The Tourist

The Tourist is an Australian six episode thriller.  It's fun but inconsequential.  My notes on this show, appearing on Netflix, are intended to draw a contrast with the bombastic, pretentious, and confusing True Detective (Night Country).  

There's certainly nothing particularly remarkable about The Tourist; it doesn't stretch any boundaries and aspires to nothing other than to be a solid work of genre filmmaking.  There are no political messages encoded in the series -- it's moral principle is that kindness, courage, and loyalty are better than cruelty and betrayal.  Most effective genre works of this kind have a similar message.  The show's objective is to tell a conventional story with broad appeal.  When this sort of thing is done effectively and with panache, the result is sufficiently entertaining that the viewer stays engaged for the entire six hours and, in fact, even looks forward to each successive installments of the story.  The Tourist is easy in that the viewer isn't constantly fighting the narrative, fly-specking it for incongruities and absurdities; likeable characters and well-choreographed and plausible action sequences urge the narrative forward and, although the show has some flaws, they aren't enough to embitter the viewer.  The audience victims of Night Country were alternately hectored and insulted; the narrative was configured to make various ideologically motivated points, most of which, on inspection, were racist (the show was insulated from criticism because written and produced by a woman and, apparently, endorsed by the indigenous people represented in the program) -- if a White writer and director had "appropriated" the True Detective narrative that relies heavily on cliches about Arctic tribal people, the show would have been universally denounced.  The viewers of Night Country were also insulted by a plot that was told in a convoluted, perverse manner leaving numerous loose ends unresolved and rife with absurdities and blatantly ridiculous plot points.  The Tourist has a shapely, if well-trodden narrative -- the classic double-chase in an exotic and desolate setting -- and, because the audience sympathizes with the protagonists, the show holds the attention of its viewers.

A man is involved in a violent road-rage incident in the middle of "Whoop-Whoop",  Australian slang for the utterly empty desert of the Australian outback.  The man is injured in a collision caused by a semi-truck that has been driven to force him off the road.  He wakes up in a hospital in an outback hamlet with no idea who he is or how he got into this predicament -- the hero, called Eliot as we later know, is played by an Irishman, Jamie Dornan, who gives a well-tempered and appealing performance.  The man is fantastically handsome and appealing to women, but he has no idea how he had come to be injured in the remote outback.  A female constable, a chubby girl with an overbearing boyfriend/fiancee is enlisted to investigate the case -- she is completely inexperienced but a hard-worker and she's willing to take some risks to try to solve the mystery.  A killer with an American accent wearing a big cowboy hat and boots with curled toes comes to murder the hero in the hospital.  He escapes but only in the nick of time.  In Sydney, a famous inspector, who is dying of some kind of cancer, is dispatched to the Outback to capture Eliot.  At the same time, a Greek drug smuggler flies to Australia.  He has some kind of mysterious connection to Eliot and it's apparent that the hero used to be employed by the Greek -- apparently, as an accountant.  There's a bag of money, a poor bastard buried alive in a 55 gallon drum, and a series of car chases and shoot-outs that take place in vast, empty, and beautiful outback.  The show is carefully calibrated as to location and the events take place against a picturesque backdrop generally shown by beautiful, if standard issue, drone shots -- after a couple episodes, we come to recognize the aerial shots of the various places in which the story takes place.  The Hitchcockian double-chase involves Eliot pursued by the police for complicity in a homicide and the Greek criminal, a psychotic monster of cruelty, who is also chasing the hero.  The chubby girl is allied with Eliot and tries to protect him.  There's another woman who seems to have once been Eliot's girlfriend, a more conventionally beautiful girl, who is also involved in the action -- sometimes, she seems to want to kill Eliot; other times, she acts seductively and desires to renew their romance.  Everyone has secret agendas and, at one point or another, each of the main characters are taken hostage and menaced by the others. Everything is effectively juggled up to a convincing, if complex denouement. 

The Tourist's strong points are its interesting setting in small hamlets and dusty highways in the Outback.  There's never any traffic on these roads; you could picnic in the center of them -- we know this terrain a little from the Mad Max movies, although this part of Australia seems more varied: it has wooded hills, long stately ridges and, of course, lots of desert.  The climax is set at a place called the Nala Stone Men, big cairns of rock that look vaguely like human beings -- they have the appearance of similar cairns built by tribal people in the Arctic.  This is an impressive location for the final two episodes where things unexpectedly veer into the surreal and psychedelic.  There's obvious sexual chemistry between the leading characters; the plot involving the chubby female cop's involvement with the hunky hero has a classic wish fulfillment aspect and, I think, will be intensely appealing to most viewers.  The protagonists are complicated, fully rounded human beings that are neither wholly good nor wholly evil.  A good example of the show's fair-minded approach is the way that it treats fat cop's fiancee -- the man would be a grotesque in most versions of this story, but, in fact, the part is well-written and even sympathetically developed.  The story telling is crisp and the locations seem authentic (unlike True Detective which had Iceland stand in for the Alaskan Arctic).  The exposition of plot points is ingenious, indeed, to a fault.

This last aspect brings me to the criticisms that might be made of this show.  The complicated enigmas in the plot have to be worked-out in several long expository scenes.  To keep this from becoming too obvious or tedious, the hero's recollection of his past occurs during a long series of scenes in which he is hallucinating on LSD.  This is exceedingly clever in that plot points are made in a dream-like, elliptical manner, thereby, softening the effect of the exposition and involving the viewer in solving the mystery.  But this sequence is showy in its own right, goes on too long, and, also, seems implausible -- is LSD really an aid to memory?  Here the show's ingenuity, I think, works against it -- although the program does present an interesting solution to the plot problem of making an explanation sufficient to unravel some of the show's mysteries.  (This was also a big problem for Night Country:  True Detective in which long sequences had to be devoted to implausibly explaining various supernatural enigmas in the story.)  There's also a Sixth Sense subplot in The Tourist that seems unnecessary, although it is also thought-provoking and interesting. 

The second season of The Tourist airs on Thursday, February 29, 2024 and I will certainly watch.  Australian customs and standards for TV apparently requires that everyone wear seatbelts when riding in a car.  Most of the show's action takes place in vehicles of various kinds and, so, it seems that about a fifth of the program involves carefully observed shots in which characters buckle-up for the ride.