The Tracker

The best Australian feature I've seen in years.

Redeemed by its adherence to a simple yet distinctive approach to storytelling and its uniformly strong acting.

Australian "Westerns" occur. An exceptional one is The Tracker, which has the shape of an offbeat American Western and seems at first a sort of Down Under copy. But it develops characters and relationships that are indigenous.

Much of The Tracker, a blunt morality tale about Australian racism, is heavy going.

A third aspect of The Tracker is less successful. In a badly calculated move, Mr. de Heer and singer Graham Tardif fill the soundtrack with songs full of clichés, platitudes, and truisms.

A decent little exercise in nativist outrage, Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, with its dynamic between indigene and colonial oppressor, could've easily been a western.

An underwritten drama.