THE NEW YORK TIMES

January 16, 2004
MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE TRACKER'
A Ballad About Hunting a Fugitive and Finding Evil
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

stark moral fable told in the language of the sort of western Hollywood has stopped making, the Australian director Rolf de Heer's film "The Tracker" is constructed around a suite of 10 interlocking story-songs that simmer with political outrage. Composed by Graham Tardif, with lyrics by Mr. de Heer, and performed by Archie Roach, a husky-voiced Aboriginal singer, together they suggest an extended folk ballad in the mode of Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly." The lyrics describe the oppression of Australian Aboriginals with the same mixture of sorrow and resistance that fueled the songs of Bob Marley.

Set in 1922 in the outback, the story follows three mounted policemen and an Aboriginal tracker on a mission to bring to justice a black man accused of murdering a white woman. The self-consciously mythic film refuses to name any of its characters. The party's leader is a sadistic racist known simply as the Fanatic (Gary Sweet). And the clenched, contained fury of Mr. Sweet's performance makes this tight-lipped, trigger-happy character such a scary and repugnant figure that you can barely stand to look at him.

In the movie's most painful moment, the Fanatic casually massacres a group of innocent Aboriginals, then strings up their bodies, simply because they don't understand his language. Afterward, he lovingly cleans his gun and congratulates it for being so "well spoken" and says, "It's nice to have a comrade who speaks English."

The Fanatic is joined on his expedition by an old-timer called the Veteran (the leading Australian stuntman Grant Page) and a dewy-eyed new recruit, the Follower (Damon Gameau), who is increasingly outraged by the Fanatic's heartlessness.

Guiding the four into the wilderness is an English-speaking Aboriginal, the Tracker (David Gulpilil), a grizzled, enigmatic figure who serves as a bridge between the Aboriginal and white societies and whom the Fanatic views with deep suspicion. As he has in other other Australian films, including "Walkabout," "The Last Wave" and "Rabbit-Proof Fence," Mr. Gulpilil has the mystical aura of a man so profoundly in touch with the earth that he is omniscient and safe from harm.

As the search party forges farther into the outback, the Tracker, who appears to embrace both his tribal religion and Christianity, is by turns servile (he calls his white employers "Boss" and doesn't complain when put in chains) and cunning (an accident in which the Fanatic nearly drowns may not be an accident). The Tracker ultimately emerges as a figure of towering moral authority who exists almost beyond time. The fifth symbolic figure, whose face is shown in close-up at the start of the movie but who is seen again only briefly at the end, is the Fugitive (Noel Wilton).

"The Tracker," which opens today in New York, could be seen as a sequel or a companion piece to "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and is set nine years earlier. The Fanatic's view of the Australian native peoples is a more virulent variation of the paternalism voiced by racist government officials in the other movie. But here the genocidal impulse isn't to blend the races until blacks disappear but to kill them at the least provocation.

The primal struggles among the members of the search party are extremely cut and dried, and the outcome quite predictable. The first major conflict erupts when the Veteran is seriously wounded by a spear that comes from nowhere, and the Fanatic decides that he must be left to face certain death. That heartless decision is only the first of many that inspire the Follower to rebel, even though the punishment for mutiny is death.

The film's mythic point of view is evocatively underlined by the substitution of illustrations for live action whenever violence erupts. These stylized images by the Australian artist Peter Coad create an aesthetic distance from the cruelty, lending the atrocities the stature of events in a historical mural that freezes the past into an eternal present.

THE TRACKER
Written and directed by Rolf de Heer; director of photography, Ian Jones; edited by Tania Nehme; songs and music by Graham Tardif, performed by Archie Roach; produced by Mr. de Heer and Julie Ryan; released by ArtMattan Productions. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 90 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: David Gulpilil (the Tracker), Gary Sweet (the Fanatic), Damon Gameau (the Follower), Grant Page (the Veteran) and Noel Wilton (the Fugitive).