for emotional thematic material.Movie Review:
Rabbit-Proof Fence
The United States is still coping with the fact that racism was legal within its borders as recently as the 1960s. It will continue to cope with this fact for years to come, but it is a small problem compared to the one still faced in Australia, where between 1900 and 1970 it was perfectly legal for the government to take half-Aboriginal children away from their Aboriginal parents, for what it claimed was their own protection.
Because of Aboriginal marriage laws, half-caste girls were taken sooner than half-caste boys - the idea being that if half-caste girls were prevented from marrying full-blooded Aborigines, within a few generations the black population would be stemmed and then eventually wiped out. The policy, then, was nothing more than eugenics.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is set in 1931, when A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), the "Chief Protector" of Aborigines in Western Australia, issues an order to take half-castes Molly (Everlyn Sampi), her sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), and their cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan) from their home in Jigalong in northwest Australia and transport them to a camp in the south where they will be trained to become domestic servants.
As most girls were taken early, few of the girls at the Moore River camp remember their mothers - but Molly does. With Daisy and Gracie reluctantly following along, Molly embarks on a journey to get back to Jigalong - a 1200-mile walk. The girls are tracked by Moodoo (David Gulpilil), an Aboriginal tracker who works for the government, but when they lose him at a river, Neville puts out an APB. It thereafter becomes a scramble as the girls try to avoid their captors while making an exceedingly hazardous journey over punishing terrain.
Rabbit-Proof Fence's story is a very simple one, but the emotional impact of the film along with its importance as a historical document keep things moving. So, too, do the performances of the child actors, none of whom had ever acted or even seen a movie before. They're not exactly Oscar-caliber, but their naturalistic charm is impressive given the obvious limitations. Sampi in particular is able to say a lot with her eyes, which she is called upon to do frequently.
Another thing the movie has going for it is the landscape of Australia, a starkly beautiful continent. The terrain over which the girls scamper is forbidding at most times, but it remains a marvel of natural beauty and acts as a jaw-dropping reminder of how empty much of Australia is, and therefore just how difficult and dangerous this trek, which took the girls several months, was. (The state of Western Australia holds under two million people - and well less in 1931 - in nearly a third of Australia's total land area; in other words, it fits something like the population of Houston into an area more than three times as big as the entire state of Texas.)
The viewer will certainly root for the girls to get home, out of Neville's clutches. (Branagh plays the chief protector perfectly - he sincerely believes every word that comes out of his mouth, no matter how odious, and Neville's depiction as a stiffened bureaucrat is disturbingly priceless.) But Rabbit-Proof Fence's story is not a happy one; it is merely meant to be instructive, or cautionary if you consider the adage that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. (Distressingly, Australia's right-wing elite continue to ignore the history of the Aboriginal "problem" to this day, going so far as to deny that much of the government's mistreatment of Aborigines ever happened.) The film's epilogue is touching but also heart-breaking.
Clinging to a continent that had been theirs alone for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of the white man, the Aborigines are the world's forgotten people, casually lumped in, solely because of their skin color, with black Africans (from whom they are as genetically distinct as whites are) or ignored altogether. The Aboriginal story is an interesting, important one, and it needs to be told.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a necessary start. A-
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a Miramax release. Rated for emotional thematic material.