Film Review: Tracks

Tracks. Rated M (coarse language). 113 minutes. Directed by John Curran. Screenplay by Marion Nelson. Based on the memoir by Robyn Davidson.

Verdict: A masterpiece of quintessentially Australian storytelling.

It is rare that filmmakers completely master the language of cinema – the perfect combination of the spoken word and visual vocabulary, when words no longer become necessary. When it happens, as it does in this masterpiece of Australian storytelling, it becomes an experience to which you quietly surrender and reap countless rewards.

It is 1977, and Robyn Davidson (Mia Wasikowska) ‘wants to be alone’. It’s hardly surprising. Her mother has committed suicide, and the world she inhabits fails to help her cope with her grief and sense of displacement. It is as though she needs to create a physical experience of aloneness across large tracts of time and place in order to comprehend her loss. And her decision to walk the 2,700 kilometres from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, with only her dog Diggity and four camels as companions, is born.

Nelson’s screenplay is perfect – a lean, muscular blueprint completely lacking in affectation or hyperbole. There is not a word or scene out of place. Curran responds with a master’s touch, while cinematographer Mandy Walker (Australia, Lantana, Love Serenade) is so entirely at one with the work, that it is as though we are experiencing the outback in this context for the very first time.

Wasikowska’s performance is mesmerising, somehow managing to create not only the frail, internalised struggle of this grieving young woman, but also the feisty, single-minded adventurer who will make this trek regardless of how dangerous everyone around her believes it to be.

Head cameleer, Andrew Harper, contributes a fantastic supporting cast, who effectively manage to out-class and out-act some of the big name Hollywood stars we’ve had to suffer through lately.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.