Walking for the cure

The question of purpose hangs over Tracks, an adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s eponymous book, which chronicles the author’s 1977 National Geographic-sponsored trek across 1,700 miles of Australian desert with four camels and a pooch. Davidson seems above all to desire solitude and escape from a so-called civilization corrupted by consumerism, sexism, racism and violence. We come to understand Davidson is also reckoning with childhood trauma. When asked point blank why she’s undertaking such a daunting, if not downright absurd journey, she claims that she wants to prove that any ordinary person can do what she’s doing. Yet it’s clear that Davidson is anything but ordinary. Though better prepared for her expedition than Timothy Treadwell (the subject of Werner Herzog’s excellent Grizzly Man) or Chris McCandless (the subject of Jon Krakauer’s masterful book Into the Wild and Sean Penn’s woefully naïve cinematic adaptation of the same name), Davidson comes to realize that there finally is no way to prepare for something so taxing on both body and psyche. What Tracks implies is that the true purpose of such a journey can only be revealed by doing it.

Similarly, you need to see Tracks to get a deeper sense of what it’s really about, and why it’s really quite good. Written by Marion Nelson and directed by John Curran (a curious director whose credits include The Painted Veil and Stone), the film’s flaws are exposed from the outset: a needless voice-over that feels like an emotional buffer rather than a way of heightening our connection to Davidson; and over-explanatory honey-hued flashbacks to childhood idyll. Davidson’s demands the evocation of loneliness and a sense of time’s passage—it requires an investment of time and attention. So the fact that the second half of Tracks, which clocks in at a reasonable 110 minutes, is considerably stronger than the first strikes me as legitimate.

Some highlights: Mandy Walker’s stunning cinematography eschews corny aerial splendour in favour of low-level vistas of heat-vapour and impossible expanse that feels more first-person than the alternative. The recurring appearance of Rick Smolan (a nicely measured performance from Adam Driver), the American photographer whose documentation of Davidson’s journey clearly played an enormous role in the formation of Tracks’ aesthetics, initially seems like a token love interest but becomes something far more interesting: a key to better understanding Davidson’s issues with intimacy and communication and the ways in which even well-intentioned people can violate the cultural dictates of aboriginal people. Speaking of which: Mr. Eddie, the Aboriginal elder played by Rolley Mintuma who serves as guide for part of Davidson’s journey, is easily the most charismatic and enigmatic figure in Tracks.

But I’m saving the best for last. Tracks has been in development for decades, but I’m so happy it took this long to get made for one simple reason: Mia Wasikowska, the young Australian actress who seems to turn up in every other interesting movie I’ve seen of late. Her remarkable work as Davidson feels immersive, a performance devoid of anything ingratiating or mawkish, a starring role without a single moment of winky movie star self-awareness. Davidson is a genuine adventurer, someone willing to do something without certainty of where it will lead, and Wasikowska does right by her subject by approaching the role with the same sense of surrender and attention. She never seems to be playing the end. Instead, she merely takes one step at a time.

                        

What happens in Bundanyabba

The Australian film industry had more or less ground to a halt by the 1960s, but a pair of remarkable premieres at Cannes in 1971 helped spark what would become known as the Australian New Wave. Both were helmed by foreign directors, though they were Australian productions and told what were very much Australian stories, using the phantasmagorical desolation of the Outback to depict the frailty of civilization when confronted with barbarism and impulses older than memory. One of those films, Walkabout, has been widely seen, dubbed a masterpiece, and written about in these pages not so long ago. The other, Wake in Fright, is far too little seen, was long considered lost, but has recently been restored and re-released.

Based on Kenneth Cook’s eponymous 1961 novel, the film stays close to its protagonist, a handsome, big city, middle-class, casually snotty educator stuck teaching grade school in some impossibly remote village dubbed Tiboonda, a place with a bar no one goes to and a train station comprised of a platform  slightly larger than a diving board. John (Gary Bond) has plans to visit Sidney during school holidays, but a stopover in the mining town of Bundanyabba gradually and insidiously thwarts his trajectory. The aggressively friendly locals ply him with beer until his overstated contempt for them and their uncultured lifestyle is softened, and soon John is gambling away his earnings in some rowdy backroom game that involves nothing more than tossing coins, is waking in strange places (with a sinisterly charming Donald Pleasance), and going on horrific hunting trips in which kangaroos are slaughtered, their carcasses left to rot. John is initially repulsed, but something in him responds to all this, something drawn to oblivion, longing for permission to destroy without discretion. A local cop (legendary Aussie actor Chips Rafferty, in his final screen appearance) brags of Bundanyabba’s low crime rate, but notes that the town does have its share of suicides.

Elements of Wake in Fright recall the stories of Paul Bowles, or films like Woman in the Dunes (1964), but a key difference here is that the world that appears to be swallowing up our hero isn’t one of ancient ritual, unbreachable cultural difference or obscure, conspiratorial strategy; it is, rather, a sort of post-colonial hell, a chaotic cesspool of white male-dominated debauchery and corruption. No doubt the film was not popular within the Australian tourism board. Toronto-born director Ted Kotcheff would go on to make First Blood (1982) and Uncommon Valor (1983), perhaps because it was not difficult to sense in him a facility with tales of men in need of excuses to become animals. And I should emphasize the word “men” here, because Wake in Fright is nearly devoid of women, and the one woman that does appear (played by Sylvia Kay, Kotcheff’s spouse at the time) seems traumatized, cloistered and abused, accustomed to sexual assault as a sort of local pastime.

I suppose all of this reads as unremittingly dark, yet Wake in Fright takes some surprising turns and is interested in more than mere entropy. Call it a cautionary tale of sorts, and a great film about a time and a place and the dangers of classist arrogance. See it. 

          

"Primal experiences stay with you": A conversation with Peter Weir on The Way Back

The Way Back, Peter Weir’s adaptation of Slawomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, concerns a group of prisoners who escaped the gulag in 1941 and traveled by foot from Siberia to India. The difference in the titles of the film and book already imply something of Weir’s authorial stamp: Weir’s story is imbued with a sense of destination absent in Rawicz’s narrative. Yet the journey itself remains central to The Way Back, its lasting impressions deriving primarily from images of unfathomably exhausted bodies staggering across seemingly endless terrain like semi-mummified pilgrims, of the small victories of finding food and shelter, and of the blisters and chapped skin that transform the topography of Ed Harris’ wisened face.


These days we might associate Weir primarily with his extraordinary streak of Oscar-winners like Witness (1985), Dead Poet’s Society (89) and The Truman Show (98), but consider how unlikely a candidate for Hollywood A-lists Weir seemed in his early years, working in his native Australia—a country that had almost no film industry to speak of when Weir started out—helming something as rigorously atmospheric and unresolved as Picnic at Hanging Rock (75) or the equally mysterious, apocalyptic and hallucinatory legal drama The Last Wave (77). Weir’s a rare talent who ushers a personal touch into films of the greatest possible scale. He’s also remarkably humble, charming, and articulate. I spoke with Weir during his visit to Toronto last week.

Peter Weir

JB: What drew you to adapt The Long Walk?

Peter Weir: I think it was what it usually is, which is an emotional connection to a script or book and a feeling of discovery that I can’t get off my mind for days after having put it down. When that happens I’ve already started to make it, in my mind, imagining how a scene might be realized. With The Long Walk I kept asking myself certain questions. Could I have done it? Would I have had the strength? What was it in those people that kept them going? But after having read the book I thought it needed something else. What I added to it, amongst other things, was the idea that it was Janusz’s wife he wanted to get back to after she’d betrayed him. I didn’t want it to just be like an Olympic event or something. [Laughs]

JB: I wondered if the hallucinations were yours.

PW: Yeah. Those too.


JB: Was there a particular element of the story that compelled you?

PW: Yes. It was to be without water. I remember going without water for just a day at home, wondering about that feeling. Kind of a silly way to do research. [Laughs] But it’s easier to imagine starving, because we know from hunger strikes that a body has the capacity to go a month or more without food. But not water. You’ve got to have that within 48 hours or so.


JB: Did you read the book presuming it to be entirely factual?

PW: Oh, yes. It was an afterthought when I asked the producers, “This is true, isn’t it?” And they confessed that there was always some controversy about whether or not Rawicz was on the walk. So I told them I can’t do it—if there’s doubts then that sort of destroys it. But then I suggested that if we can prove that the walk happened, with or without Rawicz, then I’ll do the movie, but I’ll fictionalize it. So that’s the way it went. I found evidence and then went ahead and changed the characters, changed the title, and freed myself from this man’s book.


JB: It raises interesting questions about which kinds of stories we accept as fiction and which we need to regard as fact in order to surrender to them. I guess for you this was the latter sort. You needed to know it was true.

PW: Yes. Once I was able to take some distance form the book, to use the “inspired by” credit, I then became obsessed with getting everything within the story as truthful as possible. The characters I was redrawing, the incidents they went through, the behavior, the life in the camp, I wanted all of this sourced back to true accounts or interviews with survivors of the gulag. I became surrounded by advisors so that every detail, from the clothing to the conditions of the walk itself, was accurate. Cyril Delafosse-Guiramand, my technical advisor, had actually done the walk, so he was with me for the whole production period. Being attacked by Siberian mosquitoes, for example, came from an experience he’d had.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

JB: Did you have similar concerns about verisimilitude with Picnic at Hanging Rock? Was it important for you to assure the audience that all this might have really happened?

PW: I think particularly with that film. The author opened her book with the same quote I’d used in the film. “These events happened long ago…” and so on, something that at the very least encircled the truth. I felt it was important to reiterate because for the film’s lack of resolution to work I think you had to feel it was true. Otherwise it might just seem like a bad film, like somebody forgot to write the ending.


JB: How important was it for you to give us some sense of just how arduous an experience the events in The Way Back would have been? How do you find a balance between conveying such unimaginable hardship and crafting a thoughtful, adult entertainment?

PW: That’s very much the question that confronted the editor, Lee Smith, and myself. I had a lot more anecdotal material as they went on, but it made the film too grueling or diffused the tension. So the questions became when to move, and at what rate? You have to believe they experienced these things but it reached a point where it was just too punishing. But I don’t think that’s what audiences will find involving. I think it’s that we stripped the film of most Hollywood conventions. There’s no wicked, sadistic commandant who’s obsessed with capturing them, therefore there’s no chase. Nature is the prison. There’s very few cliffhanger incidents, people clinging to a rope after having fallen down a crevasse or something. The music is also held back. These craft choices increase the film’s emotional strength. You feel you’re beginning to know the characters, so when you lose one it has a greater impact.


JB: So many of your films that deal with survival and self-reliance. What is it about these themes that keep luring you back?

PW: I think it was Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic, who talked about the gun-powdered trial that leads back to childhood. Primal experiences stay with you. In my case I was reading adventure books and biographies of individuals who’d been in prisons and POW camps. The Wooden Horse, Stalag 17, Reach For the Sky, and so on. Then at 20 I went to Europe by sea, which was the cheapest way back then. It changed my life. I got a sense of the vastness of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. I realized how far I lived from Europe, from my roots. Then I was hitchhiking through Europe, as you could do in 1965. I think those experiences have probably tilted me more than I would have thought toward the subjects I’ve put on film.

Weir at work

JB: I suppose it might also come from growing up in a country that had a limited art culture but no shortage of nature to explore.

PW: Absolutely. That and a very short history. A country blessed to have had no civil wars or revolutions, nor to have been invaded or bombed. Our soldiers went and fought in every war that was going, and displayed great courage, but the civilian population only ever experienced famine, drought and floods, as we are right now in Brisbane. Those things can all be very tough, but it’s nothing like what civilian populations went through in Europe during the Second World War. You can still sit as I did with people who have survived those tragic and tumultuous experiences of the 2oth century. That’s a function of these films too, to keep their stories alive.

The Proposition: Hillcoat and Cave renovate the western, conjure devils in the outback, get spooky, poetic, violent as all hell

Set in the 1880s Australian outback, The Proposition shakes the dormant Western genre to life from its opening shoot-out, in which the ear-shattering pings of bullets perforating a tin shack echo amongst hysterical cries and bodies shudder below shafts of scalding sun in fear and maybe some kind of demented ecstasy. This is the colonial nightmare unfiltered, moulded by a loose but lean narrative shape and mined for the sort of savage poetry that allows us to recognize it as being very much about our conflicted human souls.

“I will civilize this place,” proclaims local authority Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) once this chaos subsides, revealing no hint of irony as he viciously pistol-whips whimpering young Mike Burns (Richard Wilson) and offers Mike’s older bother Charlie (Guy Pearce) the ultimatum of journeying into the godforsaken hills to assassinate eldest brother Arthur (Danny Huston) or else condemn Mike to death: this is the cruel proposition of the title. The Burns clan are Irish outlaws in a lawless land, murderers and rapists the lot, and a smear on the dream of expanding the British Empire into this country otherwise inhabited solely by men regarded by the enlightened invaders as less than animals.

The Proposition is only the third feature in as many decades from director John Hillcoat, and it fits thematically into his small but distinctive body of work, intelligently dealing as it does with how the mechanics of state violence and control shape communities. As for writer Nick Cave, though he contributed to Hillcoat’s 1988 prison drama Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, The Proposition marks the proper screenwriting debut of singer-songwriter, and through this fresh collaboration the best in each becomes manifest. The work is both historically and politically sophisticated, and also infused with the Old Testament poetry and fatalistic romanticism that distinguishes Cave as one of the finest, most unapologetically literary lyricists alive (evident not only in Cave’s Joseph Conrad-inspired script but also in the whispery, eerily desolate score supplied by Cave and Bad Seed/Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis).

There is a brutally clear beginning and end to The Proposition, bridged by a stream of evocative middle. With context and complexity of character supplying our sense of penetrating deeper into the film’s heart of darkness, atmosphere equals story here—what’s so memorable are often moments of reverie that linger between bursts of violence, details like the branches twisted into arthritic claws by sun and thirst, flies blanketing the backs of witnesses to an almost bleakly comical, seemingly endless public lashing, or the delicate surfaces of the fine china and English rose garden treasured by Stanley’s wife Martha (Emily Watson), the film’s lone woman and one source of its scattered moments of genuine tenderness.

No one’s left uncompromised yet neither is even the most aberrant character drawn without some trace of humanity, the marvellous cast deserving much credit. Winstone’s Stanley, red face and black eyes pinned down into glistening watermelon seeds, seems hopelessly numbed to human suffering but is consoled by Martha’s pride and the innocence he tries to maintain in her through keeping her isolated from the wretched town he oversees. Huston’s devil crouched in the wilderness seems to have no difficulty reconciling his acts of malice with his love of poetry, nature and the family that drives him literally to tears. And Pearce’s soul-drained searcher, tortured, resurrected, betrayed by his master and abandoned to an even deeper loneliness than is suffered by the others, is the actor at his finest, bringing a ragged humanity to an archetype rendered far more obliquely in the spaghetti westerns of the ’60s.

I can’t think of anything like The Proposition out there these days—but then I’m not sure anyone ever made movies quite like this. It’s funny—and inspiring—how a dead genre can still bring out the best in some of our best filmmakers, Hillcoat, Jarmusch, Eastwood, et al.