John Curran (2013)
The Queenslander Robyn Davidson, born in 1950, decided in her mid-twenties to walk 1,700 miles across the Australian desert, from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean. Her eventual journey in 1977 was sponsored by National Geographic, which published an article the following year with words by Davidson and pictures by Rick Smolan, the American photographer whom National Geographic stipulated should meet with Davidson at various points of her trek. The article sparked so much interest that Davidson expanded it into a book, Tracks, published in 1980 and widely considered a classic of modern travel writing. Perhaps Robyn Davidson is a more gifted storyteller than John Curran and/or she presents herself in the memoir as a more complex character than Marion Nelson’s screenplay is able to do. The poster for Tracks could not be more misleading. It shows Davidson and Smolan sitting in the desert together; his hand is raised, on the point of caressing her face, and there’s nothing in her attitude to suggest resistance. (The placing of the two figures brings to mind the poster for Out of Africa but the latter gives a truer indication of the relationship of Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton – they sit in close proximity but are not touching.) An opening legend in the film quotes Davidson as follows:
‘There are two kinds of nomad, people who are at home everywhere, and people who are at home nowhere. I was one of the second group.’
In an early voiceover, she explains her motivation for the proposed journey. Dissatisfied with a bohemian but, to her, nonetheless conventional life in Sydney, she wanted to ‘to combat the self-indulgent negativity of my generation, my gender and my class’. At quite an early stage of their relationship, Rick tells Robyn, ‘You’ve got a problem with people’, and, by the time he says this, he isn’t telling the audience anything they don’t already know about her. He’s certainly not enlightening Robyn, who is well aware how determined, resourceful and unsociable she is.
Until the trek gets underway, Mia Wasikowska makes the first two of these qualities engaging. She makes Robyn’s wish to be alone – and her impatience with anyone who stands in the way of that – both uncomfortable and interesting. Robyn knows she needs camels for the journey and she works for two different men, getting to know and learning to break feral camels (Australia, we’re told, has the largest population of these of any country in the world). When a group of her friends from Sydney arrives while she’s working for the second camel man, Robyn’s irritation is clear. Rick Smolan, whom she’s never met before, is attached to this group. He asks Robyn if she’s thought of seeking sponsorship for the trek and, although she bluntly rejects his suggestion, he leaves with her contact details for National Geographic. (Adam Driver plays the awkward, good-natured, tenaciously protective Rick very well: he’s infinitely well-meaning but you do understand why Robyn finds Rick’s attentions annoying.) Once the journey begins, Tracks turns punishingly boring: Robyn is without human company much of the time – there’s next to no traction between the person she is and the circumstances she’s in. Of course John Curran and the DoP Mandy Walker get some extraordinary images out of the landscape and you recognise how remarkable Robyn Davidson’s enterprise was at the time, especially for a young woman. But the journey, as described in the film, is unilluminating. I didn’t expect or want a radical character change but I did want to know what Robyn was thinking and feeling: Mia Wasikowska’s presence and intelligence hold your attention but you need more. Most of the drama en route comprises a predictable sequence of short-lived encounters with people and more frequent dangers to life and sanity presented by the rigours of the trek, the elements and wild animals. The only relief to the audience is that you know at the outset the journey’s expected to take six to seven months and Curran keeps indicating on screen Robyn’s progress by counting the days (the grand total is 195).
The fact that this is a true story doesn’t alter the film-makers’ sense of obligation to observe certain conventions of the incredible journey genre. It’s a pretty safe bet, for example, that not all those who set out will make it to the final destination. With no disrespect to the four camels, I was more anxious for Robyn’s black labrador, Diggity, to survive. I knew I was hoping against hope, though, as soon as John Curran began to insert flashbacks to the traumatic events of Robyn’s girlhood. When the child Robyn (played by Lily Pearl) is sent, after her mother has committed suicide, to live with her aunt, she has to say goodbye to a beloved golden retriever: it’s obvious there’s going to be a rhyming loss on the journey which, the film vaguely implies, was impelled by the psychological legacy of Robyn’s childhood. Even before Diggity meets her horrible end (poisoned by strychnine), I was annoyed by the heroine’s irresponsibility in taking the animal for walkies in the desert: this is the most enraging illustration of her I-know-best personality. (She does accept advice, about carrying a gun and how to deal with aggressive male feral camels, from the more benign camel man (John Flaus) and from an aboriginal guide (Roly Mintuma). These are both men old enough to be her grandfather – I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be psychologically significant.) If you google Robyn Davidson quotes, a page containing twenty-two of them comes up, including:
‘It seems to me that the good lord in his infinite wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable – hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.’
Given what happens to Diggity, thanks to her owner, I couldn’t see how Robyn Davidson could derive any satisfaction from reaching the Indian Ocean. Perhaps she didn’t. Another pearl of wisdom, which supplies the closing legend, reads: ‘Camel trips, as I suspected all along, and as I was about to have confirmed, do not begin or end, they merely change form’.
28 April 2014
