THERE'S potency in cheap music, as Noel Coward put it, and a certain potency to expensive cheap cinema as well. When the screen fills up with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman getting into each other's 20-foot-tall face, Australia works. The postmodern smirking that one dreaded from Baz Luhrmann—director of Moulin Rouge! and cinema's leading postmodern smirker—is kept to a minimum. Luhrmann does belabor "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." The song means as much to Australians—who nicknamed the place "Oz"—as it does to old-school gay men. When you want your movie to be The Wizard of Oz, Red River, Gone With the Wind, Oklahoma! and a little of Pearl Harbor, too, you can expect some tonal fluctuations.

Some settling occurred during shipment of this film from the Antipodes; for instance, Luhrmann decided to chop down a subplot by showing it in montage. Never feed a character to the crocodiles in montage—audiences want to see it happen. The film does have grand landscapes, if not the world-famous outback sunsets; they've been digitally tampered with and augmented with twinkly artificial stars.

  As for the real stars: Nicole Kidman warms a little for the part of Lady Sarah Ashley (there's a name that's nothing but postmodern smirk), an Englishwoman come to Australia before World War II to take up horse breeding. Escorting her to the outback is the Drover (Hugh Jackman).

When they arrive at the remote cattle station Far Away Downs, the lady's lord is laid out, having taken an Abbo spear to the gizzard. The usual suspect who needs rounding up is King George (David Gulpilil, who was sort of the Australian film industry before there was an Australian film industry). This sacred medicine man is the grandfather of the film's narrator, a young boy with tragic-mulatto syndrome, Nullah (Brandon Walters, most adorable). Fletcher (David Wenham), the hired hand skulking about, might be in on the killing. The Far Away Downs cattle have been sighted on the land of the rival rancher King Carney (Bryan Brown).

When Fletcher is fired, taking his men with him, Sarah and the Drover must get the cattle to the city of Darwin. She, Nullah and the Drover round them up, along with the temporarily sobered-up Walter Brennan of the picture: he, Flynn, is played by longtime Aussie movie star Jack Thompson bringing a flavor of the hammy, funky old Australia into all of this mannered glossiness.

The cattle drive meets with the usual interruptions: stampede and river crossings. In both cases, the 1,500 digitalized bossies are smeary with pixels, as opposed to the genuine cattle drives they undertook in classic Westerns, and even in the not-so-classic ones. (Take the submediocre Western The Undefeated, for instance. There's something about a river of steers that's strangely intoxicating.)

After another montage, a crossing of the Never-Never desert, the beeves arrive in Darwin. The movie would under usual circumstances be over. That's the problem; Australia has to reboot, with the arrival of the wet season and a small island of happiness before the Drover longs to drove again. He and Sarah squabble over Nullah's urge to go on a walkabout. Man, woman and child are separated, shortly before the Japanese attack the capital of the Northern Territory.

Luhrmann has an expansive ambition, to get Australia's grandeur and racism on the screen, as well as telling of the Darwin air raids, little known to Americans. But while he  gives the Aborigines magical-realist powers, Luhrmann is insensitive enough to include a jabbering Chinese cook called "Singsong." And Nullah talks like Dondi in the comics: "Mrs. Boss" is the way he addresses Lady Ashley. Luhrmann captures the vastness of the land while giving it some MGM glosses; he perfumes the land and clears out the bugs.

All they need to end up with too many cooks stirring the soup is to have one Baz Luhrmann directing a movie. He doesn't understand essential simplicity of theme, and he's too self-conscious to make a film go genuinely big without putting quotation marks on everything. One way he could have gotten some power into his story would have been to bump up Wenham's or Brown's characters. If you ask yourself who was the villain in Gone With the Wind, it's a trick question: the villain was Scarlett, and the villain was Rhett, too. The Drover and Sarah are just as proud as their models but never scheming, never hurt in some way that would make them lash out. They each have speeches to explain their disappointments in life, but that's not enough. The Drover has personal reasons for hating racism, but the film feels undervillained because the leads are such cardboard conceptions of movie heroes. The skulking cur Fletcher delivers a similar badly written speech about his motivation. If Wenham had been a big enough actor to make us feel his hurt, the film would have more weight. Another thing: temporarily defeated, the cattle-king Brown laughs a huge stagy bwah-hah-hah laugh, indicating revenge to come. And then this revenge vanishes.

When it works, a movie like Australia proceeds like a steamroller. It is physically big, and you move aside by conditioned reflex: you respond to a piano in a smoke-blackened bar playing "Waltzing Mathilda," the world's most poignant national anthem, and you don't choke when the beautiful brute Jackman says, "I mix with dingos, not duchesses." But this incredible continent deserves to be seen through some greater glass than just the reflection of old Hollywood movies.

AUSTRALIA  (PG-13; 150 min.), directed by Baz Luhrmann, written by Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie et al., photographed by Mandy Walker and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, plays valleywide.

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