Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, fleeting profanity and partial nudity
By Derrick Bang
We’ll probably never truly know
why 25-year-old Robyn Davidson arrived in central Australia’s Alice Springs in
1975, and then spent two years learning how to train and manage the country’s
remarkable wild camels.
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| No matter how harsh the environment, Robyn (Mia Wasikowska) resolutely rises each morning and embarks on another daylong trek across the Australian Outback, accompanied solely by four camels and her faithful dog. |
She had endured a childhood
marred by disappointment and tragedy — her mother having committed suicide when
Robyn was only 11 — so it’s easy to believe that she had personal demons to
exorcise, and things to prove to herself.
Nor are we apt to know what then
prompted the young woman to embark on an ill-advised solo trek from Alice
Springs to where the Indian Ocean lapped against the West Australian coast,
accompanied only by four camels and her beloved black dog, Diggity. The
1,700-mile journey across the harsh and unforgiving Australian Outback took
nine months, during which she easily could have died any number of times.
Some people embrace such trials
for the sheer challenge; as the saying goes, they climb the mountain or cross
the desert “because it’s there.” By her own admission, Davidson seems to have
undertaken this trip as a journey of personal discovery: a way to become a
better version of herself.
“When there is no one to remind
you what society’s rules are,” she has said, reflecting back on her journey,
“and there is nothing to keep you linked to that society, you had better be
prepared for some startling changes.”
The truly remarkable thing is
that director John Curran, scripter Marion Nelson and star Mia Wasikowska have
managed to bring Davidson’s incredible journey to the big screen with equal
emphasis on the glorious, majestically inhospitable Australian Outback itself,
and the impact it had on this solitary traveler. Their film is both a beautifully
composed glimpse of an often barren and yet beautiful land, and an intimate
portrait of an angry young woman trying to find inner peace.
And she is angry, as we first encounter her ... impatient, brittle and
quick to take offense, and yet also oddly vulnerable: a duality that Wasikowska
conveys quite well. She nails Robyn’s surface contradictions: uncomfortable in
the presence of other people, probably to the point of anthropophobia, and yet
dependent upon them for jobs, favors and money. And resentful of that same
dependence.
And yet when Wasikowska manages
one of Robyn’s shy, uncertain smiles, it lights up her entire face: easy to
see, then, why she and her unlikely expedition attracted the interest of the
National Geographic Society, which agreed to fund her trip in exchange for
photographic coverage.
