A touching tale |
"Rabbit-Proof Fence" Reviewed by Carlos deVillalvilla (Click on the images to see larger versions and credits.)
Some stories are so unbelievable, so outlandish that
they can only be true. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is, sadly,
one of those cases. I say sadly simply because of the
hardships endured in this movie by a woman who was
blameless of anything but of having a white father and
an aboriginal mother.
Molly Craig (Everlyn Sampi), her sister Daisy (Tianna
Sansbury) and cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan) live with
Molly’s mother (Ningali Lawford) and grandmother
(Myarn Lawford) in Jigalong, an Aboriginal community
in the desert outback of Austrailia.
In the 1930s, Australia had a policy for half-caste children. Led by
Minister of Aboriginal Affairs A.O. Neville (Kenneth
Branagh), the idea was to take the children out of
their aboriginal homes and train them as domestic or
slave labor. There they would join the white culture,
marry and have children with white mates, and
eventually breed the black out of them, as is
graphically illustrated during a scene early in the
movie when Neville explains the policy to a womens group, using slides.
The order goes out to round up the children, and the
three young girls are taken from their homes in an
emotionally wrenching scene and transported to the
Moore River Native Settlement, some 1,500 miles away –
roughly the same distance as Minneapolis, Minnesota is
from Orlando, Florida. The girls spend some time
there, long enough to decide for themselves that what
is being done to them is wrong and that their only
hope is to escape and walk back home.
Escape they do, chased by a taciturn tracker named
Moodoo (David Gulpilil), whose heart may or may not be
in his work, as well as the Australian police. The
girls' odyssey becomes a media sensation in Australia;
sightings of the runaways keep the story alive, and
the vast distance they are covering, with no food, no
water and no shelter make surviving a problem.
What’s worse is that the girls don’t really know
where their home is. They only know that their home is
alongside the great "Rabbit-Proof Fence" – the longest
fence in the world, built to keep rabbits from
destroying the crops of the fertile farmland nearby.
If they can find the fence, it will lead them home.
The story is simple enough, but powerful. Director
Phillip ("Dead Calm") Noyce wisely uses powerful
cinematography to convey the vastness of the Outback,
and the land itself emerges as a character in the
film; unforgiving, but bountiful enough when
respected. The three children survive their ordeal
mainly because of the tutelage of their grandmother,
who taught them how to live off the land. The music of
Peter Gabriel further enhances the vast expanse.
The three girls who play the main characters are not
actresses, although Everlyn Sampi certainly has a
future in it if she chooses. They can’t really
conceive of how impossible is the task before them;
they are just walking home, as naturally as
if they were walking 15 miles instead of 1,500. Certainly, they get frightened, they get
depressed, their feet ache, but Molly’s strength holds
them together. At the end of the journey, when only
two of the children reach their destination (one is
entrapped by the police), Molly weeps in her
grandmother’s arms because she had not brought them
all back. It is a powerful moment, one that will
affect even the most stone-hearted moviegoer.
The Australians call the children who were taken in
this manner "The Stolen Generation," and it is not a
period in their history of which they are particularly
proud. That it lasted until 1970 is mind-boggling.
A large percentage of their aboriginal population was
effected by these events, and remains so today –
singer Archie Roach made a wonderful CD about it,
"Charcoal Lane," with the powerful "Took the Children
Away" – and it remains one of the major issues in
Australia today, one which their government has
refused to recognize or to apologize for.
"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is as a powerful testament
to the human side of this issue. It’s hard to imagine
anyone seeing this movie and not being deeply
affected. Here in North America, our treatment of the
aboriginal peoples of the continent has been shameful
as well. The experience of seeing this movie got me
thinking if we shouldn’t begin re-examining our own
attitudes toward American Indians as well, and while
we’re at it, to Hispanic Americans, African Americans,
Asian Americans – heck, to everyone. We are all human
beneath the skin. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" celebrates this.
It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.
Available on DVD:
See cast, credit and other details about "Rabbit-Proof Fence" at Internet Movie Data Base. |