Tracks

'He doesn't seem like he's connected' says a girl of Dennis Hopper's distraught Vietnam veteran. Connected? The man's a virtual zombie! In Tracks, as in Taxi Driver, the neuroses of the war come home to roost. In contrast to the latter's muddle of Catholic and Calvinist sensibilities, Jaglom opts for a more explicitly Freudian approach. Set on a train, with Hopper escorting the coffin of a dead buddy and encountering sundry American archetypes, the film becomes an increasingly specific psychological journey. But the deeper it delves into symbolism, the more incoherent and hallucinatory it becomes, fragmenting faster even than Hopper. Nevertheless, Hopper's sweaty paranoia, a sustained and terminal piece of Method acting, keeps the film on the rails. Perhaps Jaglom would be more incisive if he tried less hard to make 'art'.