The long knives are out for Australia, Baz Luhrmann’s new film. Nikki Finke is scoffing at both the film and Nicole Kidman’s box office draw. Slate’s Dana Stevens is revolted: “Audiences without a vast appetite for racial condescension, CGI cattle, and backlit smooches will sit through Australia with all the enthusiasm of the British convicts who were shipped to that continent against their will in the late 18th century.”

Variety is respectful but doubtful. And the thing didn’t get a big spread in last Sunday’s NYT.

I don’t care if Australia turns out to be a flop or not, but it would be a shame if this ambitious, deceptively transparent movie doesn’t get a little critical respect. On the surface, yes, it’s a larger-than-life, utterly absurd pastiche. The plot? Rough ranch hand helps citified female protect her homestead; war, class and race issues, love intrude. And when I say larger than life, I mean Titanic-style larger than life. There really hasn’t been a movie like this since Titanic; Australia is nearly three hours long, muscularly envisioned and executed, unabashedly romantic and surprisingly affecting throughout.

But where in the case of James Cameron’s epic that’s where the story ends, in Luhrmann’s hands that’s just the start. In Moulin Rouge!, you’ll recall, Luhrmann began with a similarly barebones plot (writer falls for consumptive prostitute), draped it in literally dozens of pop clichés—that is to say, clichés from pop songs—and created a dizzying meditation on (and send-up of) aestheticism for the ages.

Now, in Australia he’s moved on to throwing movie tropes around, mainly from classic Hollywood studio gossamer from the 1930s and ‘40s. So many movies are referenced with over- and undertones it quickly exhausted my flimsy understanding of that history: Gone With the Wind and Casablanca (and every war movie), The African Queen and The Searchers (and seemingly every John Ford western), Giant, Out of Africa, hints of Lawrence of Arabia….

Here’s what I think reviewers are missing: The main question about Australia is, What’s the point of all the film references?

Here’s my theory.

Of all of the references the two that stand out the most are Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. The latter, as you know if you’ve seen the film, is explicitly a part of Australia: In a key scene, Kidman sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to little Nullah, the half-caste aboriginal boy. That musical motif haunts the rest of the film. Later, Nullah gets to see the film for himself in a climactic scene.

As for GWTW, it’s programmed right into that barebones plot: The endangered homestead, the uptight rich woman who gets her hands dirty to save it…

… all set, of course, in a morally compromised world. Luhrmann is foregrounding race even while patterning his film on Hollywood’s most famous film not to do so. The way of life Scarlett and her world watch crumble before them is a notoriously romanticized one. Luhrmann knows there’s little talk of what the South was really fighting for in Gone With the Wind; here, with his focus on the way the Australian government handled the country’s Aboriginal population in general and half-caste kids in particular, he had to confront not just the practice itself, but the way pop culture became complicit.

Seen that way, Australia is a mirror film, both exploring and exploding the history of the movies. It is a western that isn’t set in the American West, a musical with no songs, a war movie to which war comes as an afterthought. As Nullah watches The Wizard of Oz, he goes through the mirror entirely, a half-caste kid forced to see it in blackface, a sobering reminder of how even movie theaters were complicit in our racist past.

Now, in this context, Gone With the Wind makes sense as a target—but what’s with The Wizard of Oz references?

First, The Wizard of Oz is itself a mirror of GWTW. They are the two most famous American movies ever made, both released in 1939, both MGM creations, both credited to Victor Fleming, though each had a tangled production tale.* (In a sense, the scene of Nullah watching Oz represents one film, GWTW, watching its twin.)

Second, of course, “Oz” is Australia, and Nullah dubs himself its wizard.

The third thing is something that requires me to discuss some of the events of Australia in detail, so stop reading now if you haven’t seen the film and don’t want plot points revealed.

At first I figured the Oz reference was just a wink in the context of the GWTW template. But as the notes to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” kept cropping up I thought bigger things were at work; it wasn’t until the death of Kipling Flynn, the drunk accountant, that I noticed that he looked a lot like the Cowardly Lion.

If you have seen the film, you can easily see how the other deaths fit in: The Drover’s sidekick, Magarri, eventually dies too, in the guise of the Scarecrow. The Drover is the Tin Man. He was supposed to die, as well, but Luhrmann backed down after test screenings and changed the ending.

None of these are meant to track thematically, I don’t think; the drunkard wasn’t a coward, and the sidekick wasn’t dumb, and the Drover if anything wears his heart on his sleeve from the start. Luhrmann’s just using the characters in the film as a schema to program his plot against.

Nicole Kidman, displaced from England, was Dorothy, of course, and that made Nullah… who? Toto? That didn’t seem right. Then a friend pointed out that Nullah is Dorothy. He’s orphaned; he’s taken away from his home; he had his own Toto, which like the rest of the Oz characters is grimly killed off.

But what does The Wizard of Oz have to do with Australia thematically? I think it comes in the last scene, when Nullah goes back home, just as Dorothy did. I think there’s a lot of cultural prejudice that most audiences would bring to this tale; it’s hard to think Nullah would be better off in the bush. But Dorothy, too, was going back to a primitive existence, and one not without its dangers, what with pig pens to fall into and tornadoes about.

Besides the kitschy tone, Australia has some problems. The narrative is this very long and self-consciously epic film is not handled smoothly; there are fits and starts; one minor character dies early on under circumstances that make no sense; and there’s even a long stretch, during the third quarter of the film, that seems almost unmoored from the rest of it. Kidman’s performance is visibly  erratic at the film’s beginning, and again: This is a candy-colored brawny spoof of the entire idea of filmmaking.

But we always say we want smart movies that have substance and subtexts. In all its florid glory, that’s what you have with Australia.

*  My friend Michael Sragow is finishing up his long-awaited biography of Fleming, set for publication in December.