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Brandon Walters as Nullah

This sense of future-hope and sought-after liberation parlays into one of Australia's most crucial themes: dreams. Indeed, the magic-realist aesthetic of the film sometimes feels more dreamlike than real. Otherworldly landscapes and colors, anachronistic flourishes, and pop culture accoutrements define the world of the film, as in Lurhmann's other ambitious films, Moulin Rouge! and Romeo+Juliet. For its part, Australia features a brilliant, perfectly incorporated Wizard of Oz motif that works historically (that film released in 1939, when Australia is set) and thematically (the idea of dreaming, hoping, and finding that "no place like home" stasis). Judy Garland's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" becomes the film's anthem, referenced directly and subtly in the lovely score by David Hirschfelder. A scene early in the film when Lady Ashley labors to tell the Wizard of Oz story to young Nullah is one of the film's best moments. Her rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is hilariously unenthusiastic, yet Nullah is captivated by what he calls "the dreaming song." He can certainly relate to Dorothy's quest to find her true home, as can Lady Ashley, in her own way.

As Lady Ashley, Kidman delivers a typically stunning performance. Though to a large degree the lead characters are meant to be Hollywood archetypes (Jackman the hunky cowboy renegade, Kidman his romantic foil), Kidman manages to inject some nuance into her character. At the start of the film, Ashley is a ghostly white, tightly wound, satin-gloved shrinking violet. She's lonely and confused about what it is she wants in Australia. But as the film goes on, the land and horses and adventure become her. She gets tanned, less kempt, and her "poppycock!" elitism gives way to "crikey!" confidence and barroom bravado (compare her opening, fish-out-of-water saloon scene with one later in the film, when she drinks with the rowdy boys). Though Nullah is the heart of the film (and brilliantly portrayed by Walters), and Jackman the good-hearted brawn, Kidman's Ashley is the force majeure—the goddess in geisha garb who turns heads, dispenses with convention, and upsets the establishment.

And of course, there's romance

Kidman is clearly conjuring the strong heroines of 40s-era Hollywood—particularly someone like Katharine Hepburn—which is part and parcel of the film's overall focus on the glory days of the movies. Indeed, the dream motif, the Wizard of Oz influences, the glamorous costumes and showy set pieces all come together in the fact that, above all, Australia is an homage to cinema itself. The film's epic scale, with horses and explosions and romantic kissing in the rain, summons the best spirits of the Hollywood studio system—the "dream factory" itself. What Moulin Rouge! did with late twentieth century pop music, Australia does with Hollywood historical epics. It's an amalgam of such films as Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, The African Queen, Out of Africa, even Titanic or Far & Away (which also starred Kidman). These are films of pure, dazzling escapism—vibrant, showy spectacles that are less about reality in the strict sense as reality in the idealized, dramatically lit and well-costumed sense.

Australia might strike some as a clichéd, overblown, sappy, messy blend of reality and artifice (i.e., the important commentary on Australia's racial issues mixed with campy dialogue and subpar CGI cow stampedes). But I found it to be a pleasurable, invigorating mess. Like most of the great Hollywood epics, Australia isn't perfect. It's not high art—but cinema never had that heritage. It was always a medium for the masses, and came of age in a depression, when the masses needed it most. Australia is not a film for Australians as much as it is for the world, and it isn't a history lesson. It's an ode to a place (exotic to some, familiar to others), yes, but more than that, Australia is state of mind: wonderment, grandeur, beauty, love, escape, hope.

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