I agree with both of you.
As a coming of age story, the tragedy in Walkabout is transcended by the importance it had on the life and happiness of Jenny Agutter’s character.
I disagree that Roeg has an indifference to wildlife in the movie. In fact, he often cuts in close-ups of dangerous or bizarre creatures and how they always seem just at the edge of the ability to threaten the kids, but the kids somehow manage to walk through unscathed. I think it’s one of the most striking aspects of Walkabout , the fact that nature is dangerous, but in a way aware of its necessity to be.
—PolarisDiB
Right, fair. By “indifference toward nature” I meant to say that Roeg didn’t take a strong stance on whether nature was beautiful or frightening, peaceful or hostile, or preferable to civilized life… and I think Ebert saw this in Roeg’s work, and describes it as “stark, unforced beauty.” This is one of the areas where I found Ebert’s review spot-on.
Anyway, beside the point. I like your description: that the tragedy is “transcended.” Perhaps this says something about the film’s narrative priorities.
That’s the beauty of Walkabout: it lends itself to different interpretations, both of which are “right”. I love the use of music in this film too. Not Rod Stewart’s “Gasoline Alley”, but John Barry’s magnificent score, particularly when married to Agutter’s reminiscence and that A.E. Housman poem recited at the end (by whom? I have yet to find out…). There are some images accompaned by a children’s choir as well that are downright haunting (in the best way – there’s a thought for a thread: THE MOST HAUNTING PASSAGES IN CINEMA).
My own interpretation of the film is that it portrays civilisation as losing something profound in all its endless progress and techno evolution; nature is cruel but totally honest. I see a sadness in Agutter at the end, wishing for a return to the simplcity (more honest?) of her brief life in the outback.
Any ideas why we don’t get any updates at the end showing Lucien John (Roeg’s son) as an adult? And there must be some reason for casting your own non-actor son in this role…over to ye guys.
“It is about how all three are still lost at the end of the film—more lost than before, because now they are lost inside themselves instead of merely adrift in the world.” – Ebert from the article cited above.
I’m not completely sold on this point because being ‘adrift’ sounds more accurate. To suppose that they are lost unto the world and to themselves is to assume that there was a world that one is found and makes perfect sense.
This movie usually leaves me down and numb. I don’t see it as ‘deeply pessimistic’ because it’s just the nature of the situation. Its almost a logical conclusion in its neutrality. If it ended in the other ways that Ebert mused over for part of the article the story would be kind of insincere or fantastic compared to the flow of the story. From what I get from the movie: it’s not saying you can’t communicate. The movie explores the disconnection in communication, detachment in nature and society. Communication isn’t hopeless but it is simple and complex.
Luc wasn’t really the main character, if that makes sense. The story is about the sister and her sexual awakening, survival at the edge of growing up, and learning to protect her brother in a basically unconcerned world. As well as the cutaways to nature, there are also those cutaways to “civilization”, the balloon scene, which basically show adults so simple-minded about their tasks and sexual impulses that the three adventurers wander by within mere yards of civilization and both do not, cannot acknowledge each other.
As for his son, Roeg claimed he felt a real attachment to the original text and saw his own youth in it, so he sort of placed his son as avatar for himself, I think.
—PolarisDiB
Into My Heart
“Into my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”
This is Poem 40 of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad series. I guess the Outback is where Agutter’s “lost content” dwells, and she can’t go back.
that was a sweet poem.
My one experience watching the film was recent—at home with CC’s Blu-Ray and a couple of friends. I was alert, expectant and sober. Midway through, I became vocally derisive of the score; not only because it’s incredibly intrusive but also for its triumphalism. The performances are barely satisfactory. Cinematography is unexceptional, given its natural locations. By the end, I felt that I’d endured a hackneyed primer on culture clash.
It doesn’t matter, apparently, why Dad wants to kill his children or take his own life. What matters is that we get those kids lost in the outback, strip away their privileges and introduce them to their indigenous savior. Now Roeg gets to gallivant over themes of survival, miscommunication and sexual awakening. We end up in arid normalcy with a tinge of longing and regret. It’s not unpromising, this treatise, but it appears to be a model of its time…the sixties…with that era’s focus on “straight society” versus groovy, natural freedom.
I took a gander at the source material. The script was loosely based on a novel by Donald Payne (using the pseudonym, James V. Marshall) in which the children are American who crash-land in Australia’s Northern Territory. The Aborigine doesn’t commit suicide; he catches the flu from Mary and dies. The kids wind up in an Aboriginal village and, via the kid’s drawings, are pointed their way home. In the novel, there aren’t any encounters with Caucasians in the outback. There’s no wistful nostalgia, years later.
Now, the screenwriter is British playwright Edward Bond who himself was entangled with English censors over his plays, notably “Saved”. It makes sense to me that he added Britishers as villians in the plot. Bond wound up giving Roeg a script consisting of only 14 pages! With that alone, his crew and young cast, Roeg took to the outback, improvising scenes and shots as his inspiration dictated.
Forty years hence, “Walkabout” rests as an artifact of flower power merged with a simplistic social awareness. I believe it’s sophomoric.
I see it as tragic, not pessimistic. Communication is totally possible, but cultural/ social / class boundaries are pretty much permanent, with exceptions. There’s a similar theme to very different “Howard’s End” actually, which I recently re-watched and so it’s fresh- characters certainly communicate- but their fates are pretty much fixed by their class.
Well I think the photography, given the film’s natural locations, is still exceptional.
Jesse M
I normally like Ebert’s Great Movies essays a lot, and use them as a follow-up resource after seeing a film. They almost always offer a convincing angle, even if it’s a bit different from my own.
However, having just finished Roeg’s Walkabout, and having read Ebert’s essay , I’m struck by how differently we saw the film. His assessment is accurate in its descriptions of the content, and he emphasizes the indifference that Roeg seems to take toward nature and toward the defects in both Western and Aboriginal civilization. However, his review strongly emphasizes the tragic aspect of the film over its spiritual and hopeful aspect. He refers repeatedly to the failure of communication, to his belief that the characters’ lives are ruined by the end of the film, and to the failures of society.
I understand that these things are apparent, and it certainly struck me that society was so harsh to the children, both before their departure and upon their return. And the fate of the Aboriginal boy certainly had be feeling a bit despondent; I saw it as the tragic, destructive result of an unprepared collision with civilization. However, I felt that these aspects were balanced out by certain hopeful images and angles: the connection forged through body-painting, the ability of the young boy to communicate with the aborigine, and the sister’s calm concern for her little brother. And I felt the ending, where [SPOILER maybe] the children returned to society, but remained forever dreaming of their experience in the outback, had a certain sense of spiritual reconciliation, however melancholy.
I’ve considered the possibility that Ebert was influenced by watching Roeg’s other work. I’ve seen Don’t Look Now, and that had a much stronger sense of attempted reconciliation and mortal failure. Did you see it as “deeply pessimistic,” as Ebert did? Or did you see it as I did, rooted in an ambivalent but hopeful outlook on humanity?