In a movie that is perhaps a tad overlong and a smidge underinteresting, Hugh Jackman is very likely the most enjoyable part of it. I’ve read that it was director Baz Luhrmann’s attempt at making a version of Gone With the Wind set in his native country and so it borrows the romanticized and drawn out style of that era. It’s a gorgeous-looking bit of filmmaking that pays tribute to the Australian terrain, making it as beautiful as the American west was in the Western era of film history, and with this aim at capturing an era of cinema, it tends to fall into the clichés we associate with classic movies.
The role Jackman ended up playing was apparently going to go to Russell Crowe initially, surely a bullet dodged; Crowe is quite good in the understated work that brought him to fame in the 90s and 2000s, quiet stuff relying on the subtle expression of deep emotion and immense restraint and all that, but a movie that’s meant to mimic the cinema of classic Hollywood is much better served by a showman like Jackman, who resembles one of those classic, clean-cut and always-on stars of those days. And he ends up playing the throwback cattleman with charm and wit, as one would expect.
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