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Australia

• Directed by Baz Luhrmann
• Written by Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan
• Starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Brandon Walters

Classification: PG

Years in the talking, a full year in shooting, Baz Luhrmann's new film is determined to put the "awe" in Australia and ends up inspiring at least as much exasperation as admiration.

There are vast, gorgeous aerial shots of the country's northern landscape, a crudely computer-generated cattle stampede, fire-lit romantic clenches and scenes of war devastation that look like painted posters come to life. There are characters who appear to be killed off and then bounce back to life, a cute mixed-blood aboriginal boy who plays Somewhere Over the Rainbow on a harmonica and a villain so dastardly you expect someone to tiptoe out from the theatre wings holding up a sign saying, "Hissss!"

All in all, Australia is so damnably eager to please that it feels like being pinned down by a giant overfriendly dingo and having your face licked for about three hours: theoretically endearing but, honestly, kind of gross.

This paradoxical exercise in sweeping epic nonsense and grandly conceived fluff could probably have come only from the mind of Luhrmann, most famous for the three films in his so-called "Red Curtain" trilogy. A specialist in pastiche, in both senses of homage and hodgepodge, Luhrmann gleefully mixed pop songs into fin de siècle Paris in Moulin Rouge and hip hop into William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and blended Mickey and Judy with Spinal Tap in his dance movie Strictly Ballroom.

The year is 1939, the place Australia, and starched and proper Lady Sarah Ashley has arrived from England, chasing down her wandering husband, who is running a sheep ranch and, she fears, cavorting with the local dark-skinned women. Lord Ashley has sent a cattle drover, a.k.a. The Drover (Hugh Jackman), to pick her up and guide her back to the homestead. Lady Ashley totters into a foul Darwin bar, as her Drover is involved in a prolonged slapstick brawl that leaves her lingerie strewn among the local ruffians. A comic drive through the desert, with a drunken bookkeeper, a dead kangaroo and a pretty aboriginal girl who runs as fast as the truck, takes us to Faraway Downs.

There, Lady Ashley finds her husband's corpse stretched out on the dining-room table, the victim of a glass-tipped spear through his sternum. The movie switches gears from the bantering comedy of The African Queen to Howard Hawk's cattle drive epic Red River, when Lady Ashley fires her crooked ranch foreman (David Wenham) and determines that her only chance to save the ranch is to drive 1,500 cattle across the desert to the port at Darwin, to be sold as beef to the army. With a crew consisting of The Drover, a half-caste boy named Nullah (Brandon Walters), the bookkeeper again, a handful of aboriginal people and a Chinese cook named (no kidding) Sing Song, they set out across the computer-enhanced desert.

The movie Australia is purportedly part of a new cycle of films that was to have started with his version of Alexander with Leonardo DiCaprio (beaten to the punch by Oliver Stone's version). Luhrmann can't leave his camp sensibility behind. Australia, which deals with deeply serious subjects such as the tragedy of the country's aboriginal policy and the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in 1942, is rendered in a bewilderment of tones, with moments of guileless sentimentality following scenes that seem to be played with ironic air quotes around them. The naiveté is supplied most by the boy's dialect-heavy voice-over narration, which comes in and out of the story, but there's never a moment when the characters seem any more than movie archetypes. David Hirschfelder's score is like a constant elbow in the ribs, overselling every moment of comic high jinks or lachrymose yearning.

The story starts in 1939, also known as Hollywood's Golden Year, when two of the biggest films in movie history, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both directed by Victor Fleming) were released. Luhrmann borrows lots of imagery from Gone with the Wind (down to the forelock of hair spilling over Hugh Jackman's face) and uses The Wizard of Oz explicitly, which is showing at the local Darwin theatre.

By midpoint in the film, Australia briefly stalls between imitating other genres. There's a fancy dress ball (with nods to Gone with the Wind) where Lady Ashley discovers the extent of local racism, but then the movie enters the rainy season known as the Big Wet, with all appropriate Freudian implications. Lady Sarah and The Drover's embrace triggers a massive bout of flora fertility across the Australian Outback and they resume life at Faraway Downs.

Australia's final section turns into a war film, as the Japanese bomb Darwin and the script assaults the audience with absurd coincidences. All the characters converge in Darwin, where Nullah has been taken away to a Catholic school on Mission Island, directly in the line of fire. Reportedly, Luhrmann considered several endings to the film, and he seems to have included them all. Be assured that every time someone in the script declares that no one could possibly, ever, under any circumstances, survive a particular calamity, his or her chance of survival is really good.

There's enough off the mark about Australia without bothering to pick on any particular actor, though Jackman, with his rippling muscles and flashing teeth, makes a good all-purpose Outback hunk. Kidman feels more obviously uncomfortable, as she pushes the comic scenes at the beginning and never really loses her stiffness. In a movie of caricatures, she can't find one that fits her.

Australia is packaged as old-fashioned movie magic, but its dynamics are from the post-Steven Spielberg era of the emphatic blockbuster. Yes, we go to certain movies with the hope of being manipulated, but we need to be seduced with skill. Even the most histrionic of the old movies that Luhrmann imitates balanced their inventions with emotional nuance.