Holiday Movie Preview 2008

Baz Luhrmann movies are a long time coming — it has been 7 1⁄2 years since Moulin Rouge! — but once they arrive, they tell and show you the story in a bravura rush. This hurtling, enthralling mix of Australian history and Hollywood fantasy links the destinies of a half-caste Aboriginal boy (Brandon Walters), the prim Englishwoman (Nicole Kidman) who owns the ranch where he lives and the rough-hewn Aussie (Hugh Jackman) she engages to drive her cattle to market. The year is 1939, and Luhrmann's cultural touchstones are that year's two most mythic films: the panoramic love story Gone With the Wind and the homesick fable The Wizard of Oz. It's also a Down Under western, with an evil land baron (Bryan Brown) and his even scurvier heir (David Wenham), a cattle stampede and a literal cliff hanger. But the heart of Australia goes to the "stolen generation" — mixed-race kids whom do-gooder whites abducted and put in mission schools to (as an official says in the film) "breed the black out of them" — and Walters is superb as their questing, affecting face. A high-speed ride over vast, forbidding terrain, this is the rare film that in visual and emotional scope lives up to the word epic. 11/26

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