Smart adventure from down under.
Why? The answer is self-preservation and marketplace realities. Any action picture that dares introduce moral or political complications, or that otherwise suggests that life is lived in shades of gray, risks drying up the wellspring of its power: the audience's desire to see knee-jerk notions of right and wrong illustrated in broad strokes. Every now and then, the movie industry produces an action picture that aims to balance our thirst for mayhem with an admission that in real life things aren't so simple. A few movies have achieved, or nearly achieved, this miraculous reconciliation. For instance, Three Kings, a heist picture about war-weary, amoral American soldiers who defy their own government and risk death and court martial to help Kurdish refugees, and The Last of the Mohicans, whose brooding Huron bad guy, Magua, has strong personal and political reasons for lashing out against his enemies. But such movies are rare. The more reflective, complex and self-conscious an action film is, the more likely that casual moviegoers will be bored by it.
But reflection can create its own kind of excitement?not as brutishly satisfying as the more conventional kind, but still fun, if you're in the right frame of mind. Case in point: The Tracker, a mysterious, deliberately obscure, overtly leftist action film that doesn't quite work, yet still weaves a spell. It's set in the Australian outback circa 1922, where a trio of white law enforcement officials is pursuing an Aborigine accused of murdering a white woman, with help from an Aboriginal tracker. And that's all you get in the way of details. The characters lack proper names and are introduced via onscreen titles that give you the barest whisper of backstory ("This man is new to the frontier." "This man is accused of murdering a white woman.") The tracker is called The Tracker; the most fanatical white man is known as The Fanatic; the young follower is simply The Follower, and the Fanatic's reflective, reasonable second-in-command is identified as The Veteran.
Turned off yet? The Tracker hasn't even started. Directed by Rolf de Heer, an underrated craftsman whose filmography includes The Quiet Room, it's a movie that seems to have arrived via time warp from 1973. The characters are introduced in a leisurely series of close-ups scored to woozy electric folk tunes by Aborigine musician Archie Roach; the juxtaposition of Western movie images and late-20th-century pop immediately pulls you out of the usual myopic, adrenaline-fueled, action film mindset, and summons a contemplative, almost trancelike feeling. "We are no longer free," Roach sings, "we are dispossessed"?one of many lyrics that certifies this modern western's insistence that we see things through the eyes of its dark-skinned characters.
Like many of Weir and Roeg's early movies, The Tracker is one of those abstract, tone-poem films that deliberately leaves you uncertain whether you're actually seeing what you think you're seeing?and if so, whether events are happening in the present tense (whatever that means) or if they're being remembered long after the fact. Unspeakable acts of violence are portrayed in disconnected montages, with the audio track either muffled or eliminated; sometimes the movie even cuts away from violent acts entirely to show us painted tableaus of the same acts. We seem to be witnessing a prophecy in the act of fulfilling itself. This approach is a slap in the face to action movie formulas?particularly those illustrated in American westerns, which celebrate the idea that individuals are free to determine their own destiny and that God and the land are factors that affect actions, rather than predetermining their outcome.
Where most action pictures labor for immediacy, this one feels stranded between past and present, like a half-remembered dream or an oft-retold folktale. In some screwy, vital way, The Tracker is an anti-action picture. What happens onscreen is what has to happen. We know from the minute the picture begins that the whites are doomed by their cultural ignorance and sense of entitlement. The opening sequence even features a moment where the title character spies the accused murderer on a ridge far ahead and, when ordered by his white boss to describe what he saw, insists he saw nothing. When the whites interrogate and then massacre a group of Aborigines for no defensible reason, it's only a matter of time until The Tracker becomes a fable about brown men symbolically avenging white genocide: Ten Little Indians in reverse.
The casting of The Tracker deepens its retro, countercultural sensibility. The Tracker is played by David Gulpilil, the deft Aboriginal actor familiar from such Australian New Wave classics as Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, Peter Weir's The Last Wave and Phillip Noyce's recent, excellent Rabbit-Proof Fence (another liberal action movie, and perhaps the most successful such effort from recent times). Gulpilil is ideally cast, maybe typecast, in much the same way that John Wayne was often typecast in westerns; by this point in his long, notable career, he's really the only actor who could have been cast in this role. He plays The Tracker as a classic inscrutable Other, a guy who keeps his own motivations a secret until he has decided it's time to act. The violence against the posse escalates with nightmarish inevitability. As in the final act of Apocalypse Now, spears appear out of nowhere, shafting people and horses; de Heer photographs the violence in tight close-up, denying us wide shots that might suggest where the spear came from. (It's as if the land itself is attacking the whites.) "Damn black fellas," The Tracker mutters, barely concealing a smile, "Sure they're slippery."
The whites are expertly cast with actors who, in some agitprop way, just plain look the part?especially The Fanatic, played by Australian character actor Gary Sweet. With his trim mustache, receding hairline, crisp movements and lean, middle-aged physique, he could be a poster boy for the White Man's Burden. (Randomly pointing his pistol during the massacre sequence, he murmurs,"Sic...transit...gloria...mundi.") These clueless white men spend much of the picture wondering where The Tracker's sympathies lie; in due time, The Tracker erases their doubts. I don't want to give too much away?considering what sort of movie we're talking about, there really isn't much to give away?so I'll just say that the Tracker's own racial attitudes, once revealed, aren't much different from those of his white masters. ("No worries, boss," he keeps insisting.) But The Tracker is the hero of this movie, and that means he's justified in doing what he does; the film says, quite clearly, that life is a fight, and righteousness depends on where you're standing. The movie's slyest irony is its inversion of the Fanatic's racist logic. He sees brown-skinned people as children at best, beasts at worst?nonhuman objects who must be controlled when convenient, and exterminated otherwise. He reaps what he sows. If Frantz Fanon ran a repertory theater, this is the film he would have programmed at midnight.