Movie Review: 'Tracks'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The real-life drama Tracks chronicles an unimaginably arduous trek across the desert.
It doesn't look like a slog or sound like a slog. But it feels like a slog, which, regrettably makes it a slog.
Not a disaster, not a catastrophe, not an insult. Just a labor, a trial, a grind.
A slog.
Tracks is an adventure-and-endurance drama based on a National Geographic magazine article and a best-selling 1980 memoir of the same name by Robyn Davidson (played by Mia Wasikowska), who in April of 1977 embarked on a mentally and physically grueling, nine-month, 1,700-mile journey across the Australian desert, accompanied by four wild camels and a dog named Diggity, starting in remote Alice Springs and ending up looking out at the Indian Ocean.
But the solitude-craving Ms. Davidson, who surely enjoys the company of animals better than that of people, doesn't ride the camels. Instead, she has them carry the gear and supplies, which she obviously cannot carry, and walks alongside them.
Her intention, which we come to know in a series of brief flashbacks, is to escape other people, newfangled technology, and a sexist society by remaining in at least relative isolation from humanity as she travels. And to accomplish this with minimal help from anyone else.
In general, she achieves that, although her mounting fame throughout Australia brings tourists and paparazzi to her side at times in quest of what we would now call selfies with the "Camel Lady," as she's come to be called in the press.
Along the way, she is joined every six weeks or so by National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan (played by Adam Driver), who is there to document her journey by taking pictures that will be published in the magazine, which is, after all, financing the trip.
And the two of them do come to be more intimately involved.
Another visitor is an Aborigine called Mr. Eddy, played by Rolley Mintuma, who is helpful as Robyn comes to the most demanding part of her odyssey.
For all the widescreen visual beauty of the Australian Outback on display –- and there is plenty -- there's a certain narrative monotony that always threatens to stop the film in its literal tracks that director John Curran (Praise, We Don't Live Here Anymore, The Painted Veil, Stone) just isn't able to avoid.
The screenplay by Marion Nelson includes some voiceover narration, so we get an occasional snippet of her inner life. But over the course of its running time the film depends almost entirely on the landscape, given that neither the protagonist nor the animals have all that much to say.
And while Driver does his best when he turns up to provide energy and insight, it's not enough.
This is yet another major step along the way for Wasikowska, the supremely talented young actress who has previously impressed in such films as Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, The Kids Are All Right, Albert Nobbs, Stoker, and the television series "In Treatment," and seems well on her way to being an Oscar contender, perhaps even for this role, a demanding one that finds her equal to the task as a stubborn, singleminded, self-sufficient, antisocial woman who starts off as an enigma and, frankly, remains one.
And just as Davidson pushes people away, so does the movie, which is not as watchable and engrossing in general as her performance, which is admittedly a major component of the film.
If only the film were as exhilarating as it is exhausting.
(For the record, by the way, the similarly themed solo-hike drama, Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon, is headed our way in December.)
As for now, we'll keep walking until we arrive at 2 stars out of 4. The latest picturesque survival drama isn't a beaten Tracks or the wrong side of the Tracks. But it's not the fast Tracks either.
