Tracks (2013)

Tracks is a patient film about a woman, four camels, a dog, and a great deal of sand. Robyn Davidson's 1977 crossing of the Australian desert is rendered with handsome cinematography and Mia Wasikowska's quiet resolve. The film treats her independence as a fact of character, not a thesis. She declines Adam Driver's Rick when he mistakes a casual encounter for a relationship, and the moment lands with dry amusement. This gives the picture a mild feminist pulse, though it never organizes a rally around it. The desert remains the main character, and the desert has no interest in our social categories.

The Aboriginal presence is more substantial than a token gesture. Rolley Mintuma's Mr. Eddy travels with Robyn through sacred land, and the film notes the prohibition on women crossing certain sites without a guide. Their bond is respectful and unsentimental. Because the memoir supplies these events, the casting and cultural detail feel inherited from the source, not engineered for a contemporary checklist. There is racial awareness here, but it arrives as narrative texture. No LGBTQ themes appear. No climate crusade. No eat-the-rich material, despite National Geographic's funding arrangement being treated as a mild nuisance. No body positivity, no neurodivergence, no revisionist history. The film has other business.

The film settles into a contemplative journey that prefers showing to telling. The camera watches, the camels complain, and the score stays out of the way. Sermonizing is kept to a minimum, which is its own small mercy. The result is a serious, handsome adaptation that never mistakes a landscape for a lecture. It earns our attention through endurance and composition. It does not ask us to applaud our own virtue for watching it.