But I was hooked from the moment this embittered Boer steps on to Kiwi soil, complete with hat, beard, rifle, coat and expression as grim as one could only be after the English have destroyed your farm and let your wife and three daughters die eating ground glass in a concentration camp, circa 1901.
There is a contemporary subtext to this as well, because the new wave of Afrikaner immigrants in New Zealand are often considered arrogant, though admittedly hard-working. Jokes fly about how ironic it is that they hang out in Auckland’s Browns Bay, minus the apostrophe, the implication being that they’re anti-“brown”. But then that reflects a mild resentment that the only South Africans here are Afrikaans, white and racist - whereas there are plenty of so-called Coloureds and Indians (and racist English) here too. And counting.
But Winstone plays his gruff, overweight Boer with all the slow cunning typical of what the BBC called the white tribe of Africa. Dutch writer Nicolas van Pallandt did most of his research so well that he even managed to cover a present-day polemic. If the Anglo- Boer War was predominantly a white man’s war, where does that leave Winstone’s Arjan van Diemen politically today?
Simple. Van Diemen’s bitterness extends to the fact that he was fighting for the freedom of himself and his Hottentot tracker, however paternalistic that may sound, but then Van Diemen’s white neighbour “hung” (he wouldn’t know it should be “hanged”) the tracker outside his house to show exactly where he stood on such future matters.
Without that little story Van Diemen is just another self-centred, bigoted Afrikaner. With it he and his quarry, Kereama (Temuera Morrison), are staunch anti-colonialists and have more in common than the minor difference of their skin colours. This becomes apparent as Van Diemen chases and then escorts, with variations, Kereama across the alpine beauty of the South Island.
Morrison plays his fugitive well, heading towards a confrontation with everything – most importantly himself via his ancestors - even though the make-up lady and director Ian Sharp thought it okay to always keep his hair well brushed.
It’s also a pity Winstone’s fairly open-minded character is called Van Diemen, causing confusion about whether he might be related to the man who established Van Diemen’s Land, the penal colony that was later renamed Tasmania. Why couldn’t he be a Botha, Van der Merwe or De Klerk or any of the many other common Afrikaans names? It’s confusing and unnecessary.
There are also a few technical glitches, of which the primary one is pace. This is a film in the same genre as The Fugitive and the excellent Seraphim Falls, but it starts slowly and sometimes continues thus – often clumsily. Also, one can often see the light changing in some of the shots, but then that’s the blink-of-an-eyelid weather in Aotearoa - and gratuitous aerial shots about a time when aircraft didn’t exist always niggle somewhat.
Lastly, there is Major Pritchard Carlysle (Gareth Reeves), who is portrayed as sharp enough to suspect that one of his troops is framing Kereama, but still goes to a hell of a lot of trouble to capture the latter. So no internal conflict of conscience versus king there, though it constantly seems to be on the verge of breaking out.
For all that, Tracker is a much more intelligent film than so much rubbish doing the rounds these days. It should be applauded for that as much as the fact that New Zealand has now been involved in two films about Afrikaners as characters instead of types - the other, of course, being District 9 - while in the new South Africa more than 3 000 of their kin have already been murdered on farms. But it has to be seen in the context of more blacks being murdered than whites, we’re told, as if one atrocity validates the other. And counting.
In the very meantime, ladies and gentlemen, hats off to Mr Winstone.
Neil Sonnekus
jislaaik. sounds like a good movie
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