Give Me a Home Where the Cowboys and Kangaroos Roam

Baz Luhrmann’s continent-size epic, “Australia,” isn’t the greatest story ever — it’s several dozen of the greatest stories ever told, “The African Queen,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” included.

Sincere, it can be difficult to gauge Mr. Luhrmann’s intentions, or rather his level of self-awareness. The film begins with some text that scrolls importantly across the screen, immediately setting the uncertain tone with some (serious?) twaddle about Australia as a land of “adventure and romance.” Before you have a chance to harrumph indignantly about the oppression of the Aborigines (or sneer at the country’s early imported criminal population), the text has skipped to the topic of “the stolen generations,” the children of indigenous peoples who, from the 19th century well into the 20th, were forcibly separated from their cultures by white Australians in the name of God and civilization.

But no worries! Though “Australia” is narrated by a young boy of mixed race, Nullah (the newcomer Brandon Walters), the illegitimate son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father, who is trying to escape the authorities, and while it opens in 1939, shortly before World War II blasted Australian shores, the film isn’t a bummer. Like every other weighty or would-be weighty moment that passes through Mr. Luhrmann’s soft-filtering lens — a man being trampled to death by rampaging cattle or a city being annihilated by bombing Japanese warplanes — the calamities of history are merely colorful grist for his main interest, the romance between a wilted English rose, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), and an itinerant Australian cattleman, the Drover (Hugh Jackman).

The lady and the tramp meet soon after she lands in Australia to track down her cattleman husband, whose early murder sets all the narrative pieces in place. Initially intent on selling her property, including 1,500 head of cattle, Sarah soon transforms into a frontierswoman, seduced by Nullah’s smile and the majestic valleys and peaks of both the land and of the Drover’s musculature. Although Ms. Kidman and Mr. Jackman are initially riffing on Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart’s prickly courtship in “The African Queen” — later, as they heat up, they slip into a sexier Scarlett-and-Rhett dynamic — only Ms. Kidman really embraces the more comic and potentially embarrassing aspects of her role, giving herself over to Mr. Luhrmann and his occasionally cruel camera with a pronounced lack of vanity.Though looking bad (or at least less than perfect) on camera is a particular form of vanity for actors, Ms. Kidman has in recent years generally erred on the side of physical perfection, sometimes to the detriment of her performances. But she’s wonderfully and fully expressive here, from wince-worthy start to heartbreaking finish, whether she’s wrinkling her nose in mock disgust or rushing across a dusty field, her arms pumping so wildly that it’s a wonder well water doesn’t spring from her mouth. It’s a ludicrous role — not long after priming her pump, the barren widow turns into a veritable fertility goddess — but she rides Sarah’s and the story’s ups and downs with ease. Mr. Jackman gives the movie oomph; Ms. Kidman gives it a performance.

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