LAND OF OZ
By Scott Essman

In their roughly 30-year heyday, the major Hollywood studios produced grand-scale escapist motion pictures that had equal parts heightened drama, incidental humor, clear heroes and villains, and due amounts of tragedy and triumph.  From the "talkies'" ascent in the mid-1930s to the collapse of the studio system under the weight of television and counter-cultural filmmaking by the mid-1960s, the seven prominent dream factories provided just that: romantic movies which swept audiences off of their feet and made them forget - albeit for a few magical hours - the depths of the Great Depression and the alienation of post-war urban blight and mounting suburban isolation.

Such is the template that has been scarcely undertaken over the past 40 years by either studios or filmmakers alike.  Though Steven Spielberg and George Lucas reintroduced the "big ticket" film in the mid-1970s, attempts to copy their formula were mostly failed and their presence had worn thin by the 1990s when a new breed of independent filmmakers burst onto the scene.  What few entreaties into the old style have been pulled off have often been met with derision as being anachronistic and ill-conceived.  All of which makes Baz Luhrmann's latest approach to a chronicle about his homeland of a bygone era that more conspicuous.

Luhrmann's fourth feature film, AUSTRALIA is everything that the original moguls aspired to in their canon of pictures: a broadly-told clearly-drawn epic adventure meant for each imaginable audience member and demographical group.  Superbly directed, shot, and edited, with seamless visual effects integrated into his native landscape, with AUSTRALIA, Luhrmann has delivered a throwback film with as much fantasy as reality, set in the country-continent's pre-war and early wartime involvement when the Japanese encroached into the northern territories.  In fact, the 1939 classic, THE WIZARD OF OZ, is often invoked in theme, song, and actual footage, with Luhrmann painting a portrait of a embellished Aussie group of characters who are nearly analogous to the familiar OZ roles if not to Golden Era Hollywood in general.

Up to the challenge are spot-on Luhrmann vet Nicole Kidman as an archetypal English aristocrat slumming it in her husband's dysfunctional ranch down under, a perfectly crafted leading man in Hugh Jackman who could have been playing Curly (again) in a non-musical updating of OKLAHOMA, and a caricature of pure evil in David Wenham as an erstwhile Jud Fry from said 1955 Rodgers-Hammerstein epic.  Other familiar characters from the glory days of middle-American moviegoing abound.  Particularly noteworthy are the many indigenous Aboriginal characters who populate the scene, and the revisionist treatment with which Luhrmann integrates their cultural significance into the proceedings are original, welcomed, and long overdue.

Curiously, the first two-thirds of AUSTRALIA center around a OZ-like quest as its main group of ragtag underdog travellers endeavor to complete a destined journey, with details vividly drawn from that film, right down to a Wicked Witch on the lovable protagonists' trail.  When the movie has reached what we believe is its exhausting climax, with the insurmountable odds being overcome and true forbidden love winning out, we still have a third more movie to go when the Empire of the Sun lastly invades Australia, leaving all plot machinations up in the air.  But all is well as the traditional narrative gives us due reasons to root for our heroes and anticipate the undoing of the evildoers in the story.

Will Luhrmann's accomplishment with AUSTRALIA lure other filmmakers into the past with the same implementation of classic 20th century storytelling devices?  That is both hard to predict and somewhat predicated on the international success of this film.  Will Luhrmann aspire to do the same in other movies, or was he in fact just creating his own idealized version of his country's increasingly distant past, using the 1930s-1950s filmmaking vehicle in this one film?  Judging by his slate of directorial efforts to date, he seems to enjoy feasting on the fantastical aspects of making that elusive "big" picture.  Alas, the OZ references never do cease in his newest film, which makes the postscript to Luhrmann's huge achievement even more self-referential: the next film to which he is attached as director is the film adaptation of the popular WIZARD OF OZ spinoff musical, WICKED.

HOLOCAUST ON FILM

Creating a piece of entertainment about a subject as unseemly as the Holocaust is tricky business.  With all apologies to SCHINDLER'S LIST, the topic was probably most effectively disseminated in the 1978 TV miniseries HOLOCAUST, starring Joseph Bottoms, Meryl Streep, and James Woods.  That project, created by longtime TV director Marvin Chomsky, whose credits date back to the early 1960s, was cinematic in every aspect and provided a thorough overview of one family's plight through the entire ordeal, starting with the ascent of the Nazi Party in pre-World War II Germany.

Other attempts have been successful in varying degrees, usually while approaching the horrifying events from other perspectives, such as in Roberto Benigni's LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL.  In the recent release, THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, we witness the unfolding of wartime Germany from the point-of-view of a child.  Reminiscent of John Boorman's HOPE AND GLORY and Steven Spielberg's EMPIRE OF THE SUN, both of which assumed the embodiment of a child for its reference point, BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, based on 37-year-old Irishman John Boyne's novel, selectively chooses an innocent German boy as its protagonist, through which we see the events of the time unfold, unbeknownst to this character, the son of a high-ranking Nazi Party official.

In fact, the boy so firmly believes in the goodness of his dad, with only limited clues to the horrors occurring around him, through the whole length of the story, the boy is completely oblivious, as allegedly were many German citizens, to the evil misdoings being undertaken by their own countrymen.  Even when the boy, ably played by youngster Asa Butterfield, interacts with the titular boy in "striped pajamas," his concentration camp friend, he is both unaware and misinformed about his new friend's situation.

Expertly crafted by English director Mark Herman, who also adapted the screenplay, all of the film's performances and nuances are truthful and believable, especially as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy of due privilege.  David Thewlis as the boy's father and Vera Farmiga as his mother paint realistic portraits as Germans caught up on either side of crucial issues of the time.  All of the other parts, right down to a house assistant who lives in the nearby camp, are meticulously cast and performed.

Needless to say, no story about the Holocaust can end well, though in movies such as the aforementioned SCHINDLER'S LIST and LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, good things can be derived from tragedy.  In BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, we dread the inevitable for its main characters, and despite the naivity of its approach, we constantly feel as though impending doom can happen at any time.  However, due to Herman's measured take on the material, it is not until the film's final fade out that we have been treated to the entirety of both the story and the unthinkable events that are less than a lifetime away from the present.  Parents be warned: despite the youthful cues in the title and appearance of this film, it is wholly NOT meant for a children's audience.

Scott Essman
VISIONARY MEDIA
scottessman@yahoo.com
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