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filmcritic.com A film review by Sean O'Connell
November 2002 - Turn off your computer, step outside and start walking. Keep walking. Don't eat or drink anything, save for what you can scrounge up from your surroundings. In fact, take your shoes off while you're at it. Now, every couple of hours, pick up a small child and place him or her on your back. Don't stop. Keep this up for several months, and you might begin to comprehend the true-life events that drive Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence.
In 1931, three Aboriginal children did exactly that after being forcibly removed from their homes as part of a mandatory government program. The politically-influenced community system targeted half-castes, Australian children with white fathers and Aborigine mothers. The government, largely personified here by the prim Mr. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), seeks to appeal to the kids' white blood, fostering values and cultural lessons that would benefit the children in their adult years. Three girls, however, want no part of it. Half-castes Molly (Everlyn Sampi), her sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), and their cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan) are pulled from their home at Jigalong Depot and transported 1,200 miles away to the government camps. After a powerful separation scene showing the girls literally being pulled from their mothers' grasps, Fence begins painting life at Moore River. It's not a painful existence by any stretch, as the girls in the camp look out for each other and the community is warm. But it's not home, so it's not for Molly. When the opportunity arises, she convinces her sister and cousin to run, not realizing how far from home they are. On a long journey, small victories make big impacts. The girls feed on hope provided by the kindness of strangers. By the time they stumble on the rabbit-proof fence, they're ready to burst with anticipation or collapse from exhaustion. Metaphorically, the fence serves as a lifeline for the girls, an umbilical chord that's still attached to their mothers. In reality, it's a 1,500-mile-long structure designed to keep rabbits away from Outback crops that also runs right through Jigalong Depot. Follow it, and the fence will lead them home, right? Ah, it's never that simple. Noyce makes the right decision not to bog Fence down in political squabbles and race issues. Neville, the chief protector of the Aborigine, appears to have the best interests of his charges at heart, though he pushes his soldiers to the brink when the story of three escapees jeopardizes his project. The kids refer to him as "Mr. Devil," though he's not a vicious man. He's just convinced his program could be a success. Instead, Fence gives us a cause we can get behind: a marathon journey home. Christine Olsen's screenplay bolsters this inspirational fable with warm family messages and few scenes of terror or violence. Noyce's Outback adventure builds tension through the girls' battle with a tracker, a Terminator-type seeker named Moodoo (David Gulpili). Oddly enough, Gulpili will play the title role in an Australian film entitled The Tracker later this year. It's safe to say he's mastered the role. Fence remains believable because the girls at its core give three wonderful performances. These girls would be street smart, if the Outback had streets. Their cunning and survival instincts never cease to amaze. Sampi, as Molly, displays a wisdom and strength uncommon in a 12-year-old, and her fellow travelers never get whiny, bratty or insensitive. The girls are focused on the trip and trusting of their leader. The fact that Fence retells a true story may escape you at times, but it makes this amazing story all the more enjoyable. Source: filmcritic.com JoBlo's Movie Emporium Berge Garabedian RATING: 3/10 Review Date: August 26, 2002 PLOT: CRITIQUE: For a film starved for content to fill its languid runtime, this movie managed to leave much of the more interesting facts about this historical horror in the background, and concentrate more on the plight of these three little girls instead...three girls who as actors, incidentally, didn't do much for me either. I'm not usually one to complain about kids' acting skills in movies, seeing as they are just kids and manage as best they could most of the time, but in this case, it felt like these children really didn't know what they were doing most of the time. One specific scene of one of the girls breaking down was supposed to be an emotional moment in the story, but all I saw was the camera panning away and some 'phony' sobbing sounds inserted over the score. Why not show more of the mom and how she missed her kids? Why not show more moments of the kids crying or running out of food, etc...? The moment-to-moment rough nature of their trek was not established in the picture, and one month's time would pass in the bat of an eye. There were also very few "obstacles" for the girls along the way, as most people seemed to want to help them, creating even less drama (I know that this may sound like I'm bashing a real-life event, but the truth is that this is a movie...not a documentary and it really needs to connect in certain ways). And when that whole "spirit eagle" thing kicked in, I thought I was in movie cliché heaven. Overall, I think this topic might've been interesting as a documentary (an important cause does not a great movie make), but other than the basic idea behind the story, the film failed to engage me on any level, and other than its scenic photography, Kenneth Branagh's competent showing as the man leading the misguided hunt, the creepy "tracker" dude who should be hired to play a "heavy" in a Hollywood blockbuster...I can't say that there was much about this film that I could recommend to anyone. Read any book based on the subject instead. Source: JoBlo's Movie Emporium Dark Horizons Garth Franklin Synopsis: Based on the biographical book by Doris Pilkington, and Directed by Phillip Noyce. Three little girls. Snatched from their mothers' arms. Spirited 1,500 miles away. Denied their very identity. Forced to adapt to a strange new world. They will attempt the impossible. A daring escape. A run from the authorities. An epic journey across an unforgiving landscape that will test their very will to survive. Their only resources, tenacity, determination, ingenuity and each other. Their one hope, find the rabbit-proof fence that might just guide them home. A true story. Pros: Cons: Summary: Director Phil Noyce has done the incredible job of dealing with the 'stolen generation' issue head on in a way that never holds back on showing the overall cruelty of what happened, but also combines it with a powerful drama featuring some wonderful performances and emotional power. After several years of very mainstream pap comedies and/or dark dramas, "Rabbit Proof Fence" is a true milestone in the Aussie film industry as it gives us a very mature and slickly produced production is both a very good movie and a serious work of art that will get people thinking and analysing the subject for years to come - its not afraid to make a powerful statement which needed to be said, now if only the Government would listen. The performances are remarkable, especially from the three young girls (Evelyn Sampi, Laura Monaghan and Tianna Sansbury) who are totally credible, very natural and have you emotionally enraptured right from the start. Branagh is frighteningly convincing as A.O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines whose separation of families and control over the way Aboriginals live are done not with malice but with a sincere belief that he's 'saving these people' which makes it all the more frightening (after all, don't they say the road to hell is paved in good intentions). One scene towards the start of the film displays this best - it reveals Aboriginals have to get his personal approval to do pretty much anything whether it be marry or buy a new pair of shoes. The film displays the power this one man had over many thousands of people, plus a 'breeding out' of the Aboriginal gene program which would make Hitler proud, and which disgustingly enough was given widespread public support at the time. Also superb in this is David Gulpilil as the tracker Moodoo, Gulpilil has one of those amazing faces which tells many tales and shows a huge range of emotions without saying a word. Noyce realises this and so he has very little dialogue yet delivers one of the best understated performances I've seen in years. The script is solid, very straight forward, respectful of the subject matter and yet never bogs itself down in sentimentality. There's also some surprising twists made all the more convincing by the fact these really happened, though one or two sequences which attempt to build tension don't execute it as well as the filmmakers were hoping. Others will have the LOTR complaint that there's a lot of one tense sequence, followed by another, and by another, etc. and indeed one or two are a little repetitive which makes it slow at times even for a 90 minute movie. Nevertheless the few weak spots are more than covered by some truly powerful scenes such as the sequence where the kids are removed from their parents - this is a truly harrowing bit of footage pulled off so realistically you'll be reaching for the Kleenex long before it ends. Peter Gabriel's score is a little over done at times but makes superb use of Aboriginal instruments and sound effects, whilst Chris Doyle's cinematography is consistently eye catching but true to the flow of the film with each shot having a purpose. An excellent Aussie film with a real core of emotion, bravery and intelligence. Source:Dark Horizons
The Electronic Film Critic Ratings: THE EFC REVIEW Stephen Groenewegen 04/30/02 - Rabbit-Proof Fence is a simple story based on true events. The story’s simplicity lends it the feel and power of a fable. The non-professional actors playing the girls (Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan) give naturalistic performances. Although the girls are usually required to be cagey and non-responsive, we always know what they’re feeling from their body language and expressive faces. Some familiar Australians (Deborah Mailman, David Gulpilil, Roy Billing) lend solid support. The Chief Protector’s ideas are alien and ludicrous to modern audiences, but Branagh’s nicely understated performance makes Neville seem misguided, rather than cruel. Christine Olsen’s screenplay has a slightly programmatic feel, as the girls move from one encounter to the next on their journey. But Phillip Noyce keeps the action fluid, and his gifted direction of the action and the actors transforms Rabbit-Proof Fence into an accomplished, commercial entertainment. He brings out the sly humour of the situation - three young girls and their elderly female relatives outwitting the combined male forces of the government bureaucracy and the police. Chris Doyle’s vivid photography showcases the harsh grandeur of the landscape, simultaneously impressing us with the enormity of the girls’ undertaking. Although this is one of the first Australian films explicitly concerning the generations of indigenous children stolen from their families under white Australian law, Noyce hasn’t attempted to make the definitive feature on the subject. He recognises that this is just one of numerous stories that could be told. Although Rabbit-Proof Fence is set in 1931, the ending clearly demonstrates that the impact of the “stolen generations” policies resonated far into the future. RECENT COMMENTS FROM THE EFC USERS: Source: The Electronic Film Critic
FilmJournal International Par Parekh Saturday, November 09, 2002 - After ten years of directing the likes of Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington and Harrison Ford in Hollywood blockbusters such as The Bone Collector and Patriot Games, Phillip Noyce returns to his independent Aussie roots with Rabbit-Proof Fence, a $6 million, non-professional-starring, socially-conscious historical drama. Alas, his well-intentioned foray succumbs to the fate of many “social-issue” films, forsaking complex characterization, intelligent storytelling and calculated formal design by relying solely on the “eye-opening” nature of the subject matter itself.
Set in 1931, the true story follows Molly (Everlyn Sampi), Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and Gracie (Laura Monaghan), three Aboriginal girls aged eight through 14, on their 1200-mile journey through the Australian outback. The “social issue” that serves as the catalyst for the narrative here is the deplorable act practiced by the Australian government until the early 1970s, whereby half-caste Aboriginal girls were forcibly removed from their families and transplanted to institutions designed to train them as domestic workers and integrate them into white society. An order from A.O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, played with a competent candor by Kenneth Branagh, calls for the “removal” of the three girls into one such institution. Upon experiencing the prison-like conditions of the Moore River Native Settlement, Molly, the most precocious of the girls, decides to take her two companions and embark on a dangerous escape. The title of the film refers to the immensely long stretch of fence that bisects Australia, which the young girls follow in order to navigate home. Rabbit-Proof Fence becomes part journey picture, part chase film, with the fugitives battling the treacherous terrain while trying to keep one step ahead of the tracker sent to recapture them.
The majority of the film is shot from Molly’s subjective point-of-view, with heavy stylizations attempting to involve the audience in her isolation: Slow-motion camerawork, extreme wide-angle shots, and characters staring right into the barrel of the lens serve to present a universe as seen from Molly’s eyes. The glaring flaw of the film is that, given the attempt at such character-specific subjectivity, Noyce still paints the characters and the narrative in broad strokes. The audience constantly feels as though they’re told the story, as opposed to being involved in it—exactly the opposite of what Noyce’s form is attempting to do. The result of this contradiction makes for a heavily imbalanced film that often falls back on the oft-used emotional crutch of relying on the simple and general “isn’t-it-a-horrible-thing-that-happened” dictum. We know it’s a horrible thing that happened. We can get that from the poster and synopsis. Why not use the power of cinema to delve into complexities and subtleties of the narrative and character?
This 94-minute journey film (which feels much longer) wants to involve us with the characters, but we never get a sense of the scope and difficulty of their epic flight. Part of the problem is the film’s mishandling of time. After spending a brief amount of screen time with the girls, the film cuts away to scenes with Neville, who tells us that three weeks have passed, that two months have passed, etc. When we return to the girls soon afterward, they look exactly as they did before, with nary an indication of what must have been a toilsome, tedious and painful three weeks. The wildly interesting details of the mere feat of the trek are replaced by an abridged “Cliff’s Notes” version that fails to provide any depth or insight.
Factor in Christopher Doyle’s grainy, high-contrast cinematography, which could easily be mistaken for digital video, and Peter Gabriel’s spiritually rhythmic soundtrack, removed from its proper Last Temptation of Christ context, and the film adds up to a series of directorial missteps. To his credit, though, Noyce manages to get some respectable, if inconsistent, performances from his non-professional child actors. And given the virtually non-existent attention given to this era in history, we must acknowledge the importance of the story finally getting popular attention. But this shroud of historical importance should not obscure the flaws, and ultimate failure, of Rabbit-Proof Fence. Source:FilmJournal International
Box Office Magazine Chris Wiegand
Having spent a decade in la-la land concocting a mixed bag of popcorn movies ("Patriot Games," "Sliver," "The Saint"), Australian director Phillip Noyce returns home with the supremely moving "Rabbit-Proof Fence." This brilliantly written, Oscar-deserving feature deals with Australia's 'stolen generation'--those young, part-white Aborigines who were taken from their homes and slowly 'bred out' within white host families under the watchful eye of A.O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines. Noyce's film follows the fate of three indigenous girls from the Jigalong mob in Western Australia, who are abducted under Neville's orders and relocated to a mission, the Moore River Native Settlement, situated some 2000 kilometers away. Placed in a crowded, Dickensian dormitory and force-fed Christian hymns, the girls resolve to run the risk of escaping. Led by the tenacious Molly (Everlyn Sampi), they set out following the rabbit-proof fence that leads back to their home. The mission's cunning tracker, Moodoo ("Walkabout's" David Gulpilil), is swiftly sent in close pursuit. As the days pass and Moodoo's search proves fruitless, Neville ("Hamlet's" Kenneth Branagh) grows wary of the bad publicity and orders a nationwide hunt for the young runaways. With "Rabbit-Proof Fence," Noyce has tailored an epic tale into a lean, economical movie. Drawing impressive performances from his young leads (all non-actors), he directs with sensitivity and an impressive level of objectivity. As the much-feared Mr. Neville (the children call him "Mr. Devil"), Kenneth Branagh gives a typically complex performance, successfully steering his character away from the perilous realms of stereotype. This emotionally harrowing yet spiritually uplifting tale is the kind that often fares well with the Academy. Based on a true story (and adapted from Doris Pilkington's account "Follow The Rabbit-Proof Fence"), it authentically captures a specific historical era yet at the same time treats staple universal themes. The film's technical credits are impeccable. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle's desaturated colors complement the imposingly barren outback landscape, while Peter Gabriel delivers his first full feature score since 1995's "Strange Days." A thoroughly accomplished achievement, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" won the audience award at the 2002 Edinburgh Film Festival. Source: Box Office Magazine
The Globe and Mail By LIAM LACEY Friday, November 29, 2002 Rating: 2½/5 In 1931, three Australian girls, sisters Molly and Daisy Craig and their cousin, Gracie, of mixed white and Aboriginal parents, were abducted from their mother by the police. They were transported, partly in a cage, almost 2,000 kilometres to a residential school to be trained as domestics for white people. Rather than the exception, their abduction was government policy at the time (from the turn of the century until the early 1970s) in an aggressive attempt to avoid a "third race" forming. What made these three girls' story unusual is they didn't accept their fates, and chose to walk back home. The story (adapted from a book by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington Garimara) has the elements of an epic poem -- abduction, escape, a perilous journey across the nation that traces the primal wound of colonialization. Regrettably, the movie, directed by Phillip Noyce, is commonplace, as an extraordinary story is reduced to a predictable, heart-tugging issue-movie-of-the-week. For his return to Australian independent roots after more than a decade in Hollywood (Patriot Games, The Saint and The Bone Collector),Noyce has opted for polemics rather than poetry, though the movie's politics are unlikely to agitate anyone except those who stand squarely behind racism and stealing children. There's enough that works here that suggests the better movie that might have been made. The casting of non-professional Aboriginal child actors (Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan) is the most astute. Each is carefully differentiated -- Molly, tough and wary; the baby, Daisy; and Gracie, the doubter. Sampi, who plays Molly, carries the film, often by a calculated refusal to react to what's being said or done to her. We don't know what's going on in Molly's head because she's savvy enough to give nothing away. She meets everyone with the same wary gaze, and the occasional pertinent question. By not indicating her emotional reactions, her performance allows the audience to read volumes into her solemn gaze. At the other extreme, we have Kenneth Branagh as the bureaucrat, A.O. Neville, known as Mr. Devil to the Aborigines he oversees. Branagh leaves nothing to chance. Tight-lipped and unctuous, he's a one-dimensional figure who functions in the movie solely as the incarnation of paternalistic racism. A little of this "In spite of himself, the native must be helped" goes a long way, and by the time he starts pulling out genetic charts, he reminds us too much that he also plays a blowhard headmaster to Harry Potter, leading a different trio of children who dare to break the rules. The editing of the scenes at the residential school has the metronomic regularity of a security cam, as we cut from stern teachers to wide-eyed girls and back again. (The idea seems to be that school life is intensely regimented; the effect is that the sequence is boring.) This school episode culminates in a crude, horror-movie point-of-view shot when Molly is forced to approach the prim Mr. Neville, who wants to check her complexion on her back, to assess her level of whiteness. Once the film gets moving, the central metaphor of the title proves extremely useful. The fence, the longest in the world, was built to keep the rabbits away from the farmland, to separate the wild from the civilized. The barrier mirrors the terror of miscegenation. The fence, which Molly sees outside her home, and later recognizes near the school, becomes a benign force, her guide for going home. It also allows the movie one of the few narrative shocks, when she discovers there is more than one rabbit-proof fence criss-crossing the country. The girls' indomitable determination, and their affinity for the hard landscape of elemental desert and badlands, is the key to the movie's poetic appeal. Unlike their white hunters, they are never in a wilderness; they are at home. Unluckily for them, that same familiarity is also available to their own personal Tommy Lee Jones, a relentless Aboriginal tracker (David Gulpilil) who starred in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout in 1971). Shot by Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's genius cinematographer), the days are fiercely overlit, the nights a deep azure blue, and we have a sense of the country's strange, hard beauty. What's missing is any sense of time. This is the kind of movie where, for once, you find yourself wanting more landscape. The girls run and walk through the stark desert, accompanied by a Peter Gabriel score. They meet the occasional white person or Aborigine who provide food and directions, and who seem remarkably unconcerned that children in rags are walking across the country. When, after a few scenes cutting back and forth between the girls and their hunters, Neville announces at one point that the children have been lost for a month, it does not seem credible. Not until the final shot does Noyce rise up to the potential of the history: Two grandmothers, the real-life Molly and Daisy, seven decades later, totter toward a handheld camera. There's a sudden shiver of recognition, that, my God, these people really lived this. Source: The Globe and Mail
The LA Times By Manohla Dargis, Times Staff Writer November 29, 2002 - An old-fashioned weepie tucked inside a fiercely indicting political thriller, Phillip Noyce's "Rabbit-Proof Fence" opens in the early 1930s along a stretch of red Australian dust called Jigalong. Located in the western part of the continent, Jigalong was a depot for the transcontinental fence built by the government after the turn of the century to protect agricultural lands from a plague of rabbits. Years after the fence was erected, Jigalong had become little more than a holding station for the area's indigenous people, including 14-year-old Molly Craig (Everlyn Sampi) and her two young cousins, Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and Gracie (Laura Monaghan), all three fathered and abandoned by white workers. The fence was one more marker of an already divided country. By the early 20th century, Australian Aborigines had been herded onto separate lands where their lives, including the right to marry and to work, were under the complete authority of the white government. Biracial children were of particular interest, since the government looked at them as a potential source of cheap labor that could be absorbed into the white population. "Sixty years ago," said one official in 1937, "there were over 60,000 full-blooded natives in Western Australia. Today, there are only 20,000. In time, there would be none." To that end, from about 1910 to 1970, an estimated 10% of children were removed, often permanently, from their homes. In 1931, Molly Craig and her cousins, ages 8 and 10, became part of what's known as Australia's "stolen generations" when they were spirited away from their family to a white-run dormitory 1,500 miles south of Jigalong. Dormitory, though, is too polite a word for the Dickensian nightmare painted by the filmmakers. Warehoused in clapboard shacks, the children were denied their customs and language ("We don't use that jabber here," scolds one of the white nurses) in an effort to strip the black out of them. Under constant guard, they labored at sewing tables during the day, while at night they slept in filthy bedding, using a communal slop pail for a privy. One of the crueler ironies of the children's captivity, as meted out in Noyce's film, is that if a child had the temerity to escape the camp, it was an Aboriginal man armed with a whip who was sent to bring the runaway back. Molly lasted just one day. Taking hold of her cousins, the prepossessed 14-year-old headed for home -- by foot. For three months, the girls hid from trackers (one of whom is played by David Gulpilil, the Aboriginal boy from "Walkabout"), covering their footprints, sleeping in rabbit warrens, scavenging for something to eat and begging food off of sympathetic white female farmers. The journey was as unrelenting as the terrain and the will of the white authorities, the latter of which Noyce overplays to the point of parody, particularly in the characterization of the children's government protector, Mr. Neville (Kenneth Branagh). As the film's embodiment of Australia's racist past, this Social Darwinist spends much of his time reciting variations on the line, "in spite of himself, the native must be helped." All that's missing is a waxed mustache to twirl. Based on a book by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington, and written for the screen by Christine Olsen, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is the first film Noyce has directed in his home country since his 1989 nail-biter "Dead Calm." In the years following, Noyce made the move to Hollywood, where he directed a series of progressively anonymous action movies, the most noteworthy of which starred Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan, first in "Patriot Games," then in "Clear and Present Danger." Those were the high points. Otherwise, it was a gilded slide into the abyss with "Sliver," "The Saint" and his last major-studio outing, "The Bone Collector," in which Denzel Washington played a homicide detective who was also a quadriplegic principally, or so it appeared, so he couldn't get his hands on co-star Angelina Jolie. "The Bone Collector" makes a startling contrast to the features Noyce has since directed, including the recent "The Quiet American." As with his adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, this new film is a genuine pursuit of seriousness -- it is, simply put, about something. Among other things, these are films about power and about the burden of history, as it weighs down not merely the oppressed but also those who bend it to their will. In this sense, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" serves as unassailable proof of Noyce's good intentions, even if as a political statement it's at once over- and under-cooked, with little memorable dialogue and neither enough moral or political nuance. The young actresses who play the fugitives, all newcomers, shoulder the story confidently, their solemn quiet a relief from Branagh's gnashing villainy. You understand the director's rage, but in making Neville the story's chief repository of evil, Noyce and the screenwriter have effectively diluted the ferocity of their argument, turning a country's shame into one madman's mission. The frequent cutaways to Neville are more distracting than illuminating so that, in the end, what keeps the film on course is the relentlessness of the girls' determination, as it's both framed by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who carves mood and feeling from the landscape, and tenderly guided by Noyce. When Molly, Daisy and Gracie break into a heart-pounding run, you are reminded that not everything the director did in Hollywood was rubbish. In 1997, the government released a report on the forced removal of Aboriginal children which concluded that its past policies actually met the definition of genocide. That hasn't sat well with some of the country's white residents, a number of whom greeted Noyce's film with noisy protest when it opened in Australia earlier this year. Local newspapers churned with rebuttals from protesters who denied both the extremity of the removal and its assimilationist intentions on the grounds that either Aboriginal children needed to be protected from their families or had been willingly handed over to white authorities. Even the film's tagline ("What if the government kidnapped your daughter?") elicited official condemnation. Noyce, meanwhile, has stood firm. In his own modest fashion, he too has gone home. Source: The LA Times
Newsday By John Anderson Rating 3/5 November 29, 2002 - RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (PG). Three "half-caste" girls, seized under Australia's Aboriginal policy, escape the law and make their way home. The story is true, the landscapes stunning and the movie strong, if slightly less involving than it might have been. With Everlyn Sampi, David Gulpilil, Kenneth Branagh. Screenplay by Christine Olsen, based on "Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence" by Doris Pilkington Garimara. Directed by Phillip Noyce. 1:35 (adult content). At the Paris, 58th Street west of Fifth Avenue, and the Sunshine Cinemas, East Houston at Second Avenue, Manhattan. Opens wide late December. Working their way north beginning in 1901, white Australian workers left behind a solution - a "rabbit-proof fence" meant to keep the voracious bunnies from eating their way west. They also left behind a problem - mixed-race children born of Aboriginal mothers and looked upon by Official Australia as a kind of human pest. In an attempt to "advance them to white status" - as it is put so benevolently by A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), the fact-based Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia - the children were taken from their mothers, put into camps, and forbidden to wed full-blooded Aboriginals. The idea: to "protect" Australia's natives by breeding their dark hue out of the half-white "half-castes." All this is true, as appalling as it is; children were apparently taken from their mothers under government policy as late as 1971. "Rabbit-Proof Fence," the second Phillip Noyce movie released in as many weeks (the other being "The Quiet American"), is true as well - based on a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, it is about the author's mother, who in 1931 escaped with her sister and cousin from an internment camp for mixed-blood children, trekking 1,500 miles to get back home. The problem for director Noyce is all this reality: The action of the picture pales in relation to the facts that provoke it. Still, there's no denying the power of the story. Or for that matter, Molly, who inspired the book and is played as a girl by the wonderful young Everlyn Sampi. Unwilling to surrender to life in captivity, deaf to the entreaties of Neville (whom the children call "Mr. Devil") and unafraid of the camp's imposing bush tracker, Moodoo (the well-known Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, of "Walkabout" and "Crocodile Dundee"), she picks a day when the rain will wash out their footprints, takes Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and Gracie (Laura Monaghan) in hand and heads for home, following the rabbit-proof fence. Noyce employs various film stocks to evoke 1930s Australia - grainy and yellow during more hopeless moments; hard, gem-like colors during more upbeat scenes and, in Perth, a kind of hand-tinted effect that evokes a postcard past - which seems a misfire, given how relatively recently Australia stopped snatching children. But then, casting Neville in such light does him justice: Intent on recapturing the girls, he enlists a budget-busting amount of police support, makes headlines and waxes indignant ("If they would only understand what we're trying to do for them"). Why he doesn't send two policemen to watch Molly's mother and wait for the children - for that is surely where they are going, and no one ever expresses a doubt they'll make it - is the movie's mystery. Molly is a heroine, but Neville must have been an interesting specimen himself. Portrayed as quite rationally racist, he is more than willing to give the Aboriginal - in this case Molly - his/her due. "Just because people use neolithic tools doesn't mean they have neolithic minds," he cautions. As with most like-minded, enlightened bigots, he never follows his own logic where it might take him, because reason is apparently recessive, prejudice dominant. That Neville had a happier end than the other characters in "Rabbit-Proof Fence" seems quite a predictable thing, in a similarly predictable but nonetheless moving film. Source: Newsday
The New York Times By STEPHEN HOLDEN November 29, 2002 - Casting a measured gaze on a shameful chapter of Australian history, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" makes no bones about who is right and wrong in its devastating portrayal of that country's disgraceful treatment of its Aborginal population for much of the last century. Although the movie, adapted from a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, pushes emotional buttons and simplifies its true story to give it the clean narrative sweep of an extended folk ballad, it never goes dramatically overboard.
On the side of right are the Australian Aborigines whose families were torn apart by a government policy of forcibly removing children of mixed race from their Outback communities and transporting them to settlement camps hundreds of miles away. Once in the camps, they were forbidden to speak their native language and were indoctrinated into the religion and customs of the dominant white culture. Eventually they were integrated into the general population as domestic servants and farm laborers. On the side of wrong is the Australian government, which, for more than half a century (from 1905 to 1971) carried out this appalling program of legalized kidnapping. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is set in 1931, when the executor of that policy was A. O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), a man so intransigently certain of its ultimate benefit to everyone involved that he makes Rudyard Kipling seem benign. The chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia in 1931 when malignant racial theories were in ascendancy throughout the world, Neville is the legal guardian of all Aboriginal people in that state. Convinced that the Aborigines are dying out, he is committed to hastening their disappearance by enforcing a law that forbids children of mixed marriages to marry full-blooded Aborigines. In one scene, Neville smugly pulls out a chart that supposedly proves how, in three generations after an interracial marriage, all Aboriginal characteristics have disappeared in the offspring. Christine Olsen's subtle but biting screenplay and Mr. Branagh's understated performance refrain from portraying Neville as an overtly fiendish monster. As he executes decisions that are all taken in a spirit of benign paternalism, he comes across as the apotheosis of the kind of blind racism that takes for granted the superiority of white Western culture. This sturdy, touching movie, directed by Phillip Noyce, who also oversaw "The Quiet American," personalizes this historical outrage by telling the story of three young girls who escape from a settlement and set out to make the 1,200-mile trek back home on foot. The events are based on the experiences of Ms. Garimara's mother, Molly (Everlyn Sampi), who is 14 at the time of the movie; her 8-year-old sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), and their 10-year-old cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan). All three are mixed-race children fathered by itinerant white fence workers. The story begins in the tiny depot of Jigalog in northwestern Australia on the edge of the Gibson Desert. Coursing through this Aboriginal community is a rabbit-proof fence. Built to keep the country's rabbits on one side and its pasture land on the other, it spans the entire length of Australia from north to south. Hearing that the three girls are running wild in Jigalog, Neville authorizes their removal to the Moore River Native Settlement 1,200 miles away. But when his deputy, Constable Riggs (Jason Clarke), drives to Jigalog to pick them up, he must overcome the resistance of the girls' mothers from whose arms they are forcibly wrested. The Moore Settlement resembles a spartan rural orphanage with dormitory housing and strict regimentation. When children try to escape, they are retrieved by Moodoo (David Gulpilil), an experienced black tracker, and punished with solitary confinement. For Molly, who bridles at the daily humiliation, the final straw comes when the girls are told they have no mothers. One day while the other children are in church, she coaxes Daisy and Gracie to flee with her into the woods. The bulk of the movie follows them on a three-month trek through forest, field and desert, during much of which they use the rabbit-proof fence to guide them home. As the news of their remarkable elusiveness reaches Jigalog, Molly and Daisy's mother, Maude (Ningali Lawford), and their grandmother, Frinda (Myarn Lawford), hold a vigil in which they chant and send signals by tapping on the fence. If "Rabbit-Proof Fence," which opens today in Manhattan and Los Angeles, has the upbeat tone and deliberate pace of a ballad, Molly is its radiant folk heroine. Profoundly intuitive, indomitably courageous, endowed with superhuman resilience, she is the stuff of legend. And as played by Ms. Sampi, she emits a steady glow even in moments of desperation. The story could easily have been treated as a brutally suspenseful manhunt in which the girls survive any number of narrow escapes from their pursuers. But in Mr. Noyce's hands their journey is touched with enchantment, and the movie becomes a paean to the beauty of the Australian countryside and the decency of most of the common people who aid the fugitives. Under Molly's resourceful guidance, the girls are able to find enough food and water to keep them going. If their continued well-being seems unreal, that's part of the movie's myth-making strategy. As the story jumps back and forth between their journey and the frustrated attempts to capture them, at moments it almost feels like a jaunty game of hide and seek. But the spic-and-span wholesomeness of "Rabbit-Proof Fence" ultimately makes its sting all the sharper. Its portrait of people who see themselves as decent, self-righteously trying to eradicate another culture, has the impact of a swift, hard slap in the face. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Its scenes of kidnapping could upset young children. Source: The New York Times
UPI By Claude Salhani 11/15/2002 - WASHINGTON - Don't let the title of "Rabbit-Proof Fence" fool you. This is not a film about animal husbandry but rather an impartial, almost-documental feature film dealing with the white man's arrogant effort to dominate the Aborigines in Australia. Much as in other parts of the globe where the white European settler arrived to colonize and forcefully impose his Judeo-Christian beliefs on the natives, convinced that he was doing so for their own good, such as in North America and Africa, so too, was the case in Australia. The fact that these native populations managed to exist and thrive in harsh conditions for close to 60,000 years without the Europeans' help, thank you very much, seemed largely irrelevant. In fact, the native population, be it in North, Central or South America, Africa and Australia suffered greatly from the settlers' imported diseases, highly racist attitudes and pre-conditioned beliefs that their way was the only godly way to live. From an estimated population of 300,000 when Capt. James Cook first landed in Botany Bay in 1778, the Aborigines dwindled down to about 60,000. Within two years, smallpox killed about half the population around Sydney. At first the British did not wish to harm the Aborigines. Arthur Phillip, the first governor of Australia, started the penal settlement with the intentions of "reconciling the Aboriginals to live amongst us, and to teach them the advantages they will reap from cultivating the land." But the settlers assumed that their European and Christian ways were simply superior. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" tells the true story of three Aboriginal girls who are forcibly taken from their families in Western Australia in 1931 to be trained as domestic servants as part of an official Australian government strategy to control the proliferation as well as the movement of non whites. Mirroring South Africa's apartheid system, Australia's guiding principle regarding the Aborigines determined if the autochthonous people could travel around the country to visit close relatives, if they could marry, or even if and when they were allowed to purchase new shoes. They, however, went a step further in trying to water down the Aborigine bloodline by marrying lighter-skinned natives to whites, in the hope of "whitening" the race over the course of three or four generations. This stringent policy deciding the fate of Australia's Aboriginal population was eradicated only in 1970. The story of Molly, Daisy and Gracie is just one of thousands of similar tragic events in the lives of the Aborigines, or Koori, as they prefer to be called. The film, based on a book written by Doris Pilkington, the daughter of one of the three girls, follows their daring escape from a camp where Aboriginal girls are brought, taught English "and proper manners," forced to forget their mother tongues, as well as their mothers. Braving Australia's inhospitable climate and terrain, the three girls embark on an epic 1,500-mile trek that takes them through the continent's notoriously rugged Outback as they gradually make their way -- on foot and with no supplies -- back to their home village. They use the "Rabbit-Proof Fence," a wire mesh fence that bisects the Australian continent, to navigate their way home, while the authorities, "determined not to be made fools of," remain in hot pursuit. Director Phillip Noyce ("Clear and Present Danger" and "Patriot Games) does a wonderful job portraying this poignant story and directing the three young girls, Everlyn Sampi (Molly), Tianna Sansbury (Daisy), and Laura Monaghan (Gracie). Kenneth Branagh ("Hamlet" and "Wild Wild West") is outstanding in the role of the cool, reserved and almost-Dr. Mengele-like Australian administrator of Aboriginal rights, Mr. Neville, whom the girls appropriately call "Mr. Devil." He is the one who decides which of the girls are "acceptable," after a quick inspection of their bodies. And David Gulpilil, who played the role of "Crocodile Dundee's" Aborigine friend in the film of the same name, is great at Moodoo, the tracker whom the girls manage to outsmart and remain a step ahead (or behind) of. Peter Gabriel's sound track, using Western and Aboriginal music, adds much flavor to the film. Rated PG, for the movie's distressing scenes when the three girls are forcibly removed from their mother, may well upset younger audiences. Still, Noyce has artfully managed to relate a powerful story without making it seem as an anti-European, anti-white propaganda crusade. It is simply part of our history as human beings with which we have to live, and hopefully to learn from. The film comes out in the Unites States in December. Source:UPI
Canadian Press
November 27, 2002 - What better tale than this: A child who instinctively knows right from wrong fearlessly taking on an unjust system, besting adults who are so blinded by self-righteousness they can't see they are committing a crime against humanity? Australian director Phillip Noyce returns home to direct the heartbreaking Rabbit-Proof Fence -- the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who fought Australia's racist policy of abducting half-caste children from their parents by walking 2,400 kilometres across harsh terrain to get home. From 1905 to 1971, under the misguided belief it was "rescuing" children doomed to a life of poverty and ignorance, the Australian government took all children with any trace of white blood away from their Aboriginal families, placed them in state homes and trained them to be maids and farm workers. These forced separations created what is now known as the "Stolen Generations" -- and the decades-long pain of those partings has become the defining element of what it means to be Aboriginal today. Noyce's movie is based on a book about the astonishing 1931 exploits of 14-year-old Molly Craig, her eight-year-old sister Daisy and her 10-year-old cousin Gracie, who navigated across Western Australia by following the north-south "rabbit-proof" fence that runs from sea to sea. It was written by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington Garimara - but only after Garimara herself was reunited with her mother after 30 years of separation. Three elements make the movie -- a story of deep love and loss, an electric child actor in Everlyn Sampi, and an Australian landscape so harsh it makes the American Southwest look like a suburban park. As Molly, the 11-year-old Sampi speaks very little but reveals the full weight of an unjust world in her dark brown eyes. Molly is driven by mistrust -- for good reason -- and that wariness steels her, saves her and transforms her into a cunning adversary. On her trail are an Aboriginal tracker (David Gulpilil) and scores of police led by the Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia, Mr. A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), who is taking Molly's flight as a personal affront. He should, of course, since the local newspapers are taking some glee in the fact that a young girl is making his department look like Keystone Cops. In Home Alone, another tale of childhood heroism, the bad guys just pretended to be cops. Here the bad guys are the cops -- and the scene where the three girls are ripped screaming away from their mother stabs the heart and lays bare the Australian government's horrific abuse of power. Branagh manages to present a sympathetic side of Neville, a man seized by misguided missionary zeal. "If we are to train such children for the future, they cannot be left as they are. In spite of himself, the native must be helped," Neville declares. Behind his back, the Aboriginal children call him "Neville Devil." It's a very different role than the one Branagh is playing in in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Noyce also has another well-reviewed movie out, The Quiet American, based on the book by Graham Greene. That and Rabbit-Proof Fence represent a distinct shift of pace for him after directing such high-action thrillers as Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, and The Bone Collector. Australia is known for its stunning terrain, but the areas featured in Rabbit-Proof Fence are not going to appear in any tourism ads. All colours bleach down to two -- yellow or reddish dust -- in a moonscape that stretches to the horizon. The idea that young children could navigate through this for more than nine weeks boggles the imagination. At the end, when the real Molly Craig, now in her 80s, is shown with her sister -- two old women still walking along an Outback road -- the triumph of the human spirit smacks you in the face and makes you weep. Rabbit-Proof Fence, a Miramax release, has a running time of 95 minutes. It's in English and native Aboriginal dialect with English subtitles. Source:Canadian Press
*** 1/2 (PG) BY ROGER EBERT FILM CRITIC December 25, 2002 - The most astonishing words in "Rabbit-Proof Fence" come right at the end, printed on the screen as a historical footnote. The policies depicted in the movie were enforced by the Australian government, we are told, until 1970. Aboriginal children of mixed race were taken by force from their mothers and raised in training schools that would prepare them for lives as factory workers or domestic servants. More than a century after slavery was abolished in the Western world, a Western democracy was still practicing racism of the most cruel description. The children's fathers were long gone--white construction workers or government employees who enjoyed sex with local Aboriginal women and then moved on. But why could the mixed-race children not stay where they were? The offered explanations are equally vile. One is that a half-white child must be rescued from a black society. Another was that too many "white genes" would by their presumed superiority increase the power and ability of the aborigines to cause trouble by insisting on their rights. A third is that, by requiring the lighter-skinned children to marry each other, blackness could eventually be bred out of them. Of course it went without saying that the "schools" they were held in prepared them only for menial labor. The children affected are known today in Australia as the Stolen Generations. The current Australian government of Prime Minster John Howard actually still refuses to apologize for these policies. Trent Lott by comparison is enlightened. Phillip Noyce's film is fiction based on fact. The screenplay by Christine Olsen is based on a book by Doris Pilkington, telling the story of the experiences of her mother, Molly, her aunt Daisy and their cousin Gracie. Torn from their families by government officials, they were transported some 1,500 miles to a training school, where they huddled together in fear and grief, separated from everyone and everything they had ever known. When they tried to use their own language, they were told to stop "jabbering." At the time of the adventures in the movie, Molly (Everlyn Sampi) is 14, Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) is 8 and Gracie (Laura Monaghan) is 10. The school where they are held is not a Dickensian workhouse; by the standards of the time, it is not unkind (that it inflicts the unimaginable pain of separation from family and home does not figure into the thinking of the white educators). The girls cannot abide this strange and lonely place. They run away, are captured, are placed in solitary confinement. They escape again and start walking toward their homes. It will be a journey of 1,500 miles. They have within their heads an instinctive map of the way and are aided by a fence that stretches for hundreds of miles across the outback, to protect farmlands from a pestilence of rabbits. The principal white character in the movie is A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), who in 1931 was the administrator of the relocation policies and something of an amateur eugenicist, with theories of race and breeding that would have won him a ready audience in Nazi Germany. That Australians could have accepted thinking such as his, and indeed based government policy on it, indicates the sorry fact that many of them thought aborigines were a step or two down the evolutionary ladders from modern Europeans. That the Aboriginal societies of Australian and New Zealand were remarkably sophisticated was hard for the whites to admit--especially because, the more one credited these native races, the more obvious it was that the land had been stolen from their possession. As the three girls flee across the vast landscape, they are pursued by white authorities and an Aboriginal tracker named Moodoo (David Gulpilil), who seems not especially eager to find them. Along the way, they are helped by the kindness of strangers, even a white woman named Mavis (Deborah Mailman). This journey, which evokes some of the same mystery of the outback evoked in many other Australian films (notably "Walkabout"), is beautiful, harrowing and sometimes heartbreaking. The three young stars are all aborigines, untrained actors, and Noyce is skilled at the way he evokes their thoughts and feelings. Narration helps fill gaps and supplies details that cannot be explained onscreen. The end of the journey is not the same for all three girls, and there is more heartbreak ahead, which would be wrong for me to reveal. But I must say this. The final scene of the film contains an appearance and a revelation of astonishing emotional power; not since the last shots of "Schindler's List" have I been so overcome with the realization that real people, in recent historical times, had to undergo such inhumanity. Source:Chicago Sun-Times
Hollywood Reporter By Erin Free Feb. 21, 2002 - This review was written for the festival screening of "Rabbit-Proof Fence." SYDNEY - "Rabbit-Proof Fence," from Australian director Phillip Noyce, tackles the issues of Aboriginal Australia head-on. Discussions rage here about the so-called "Stolen Generation" -- a cohort of Aboriginal Australians taken by the government from their families, "for their own good," to be integrated into white society through work as household domestics -- and the government's debt of apology to them. With this film, Noyce has walked into the middle of the fray; using his gifts as a creator of expertly crafted, highly accomplished commercial successes, he has made a movie as exciting and accessible as it is timely. In Australia, films about the indigenous experience have an unfortunate track record of not communicating on a large scale with local audiences. Although such films as "Dead Heart," "Serenades" and "Yolngu Boy" often strike a chord with critics and art house audiences, recognition on a wider scale is usually lacking. That trend is about to get turned on its head. Molly, Daisy and Gracie (played by extraordinary new finds Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan, respectively) are Aboriginal girls who feel the sting of governmental interference when torn from their mother and sent to live at a remote mission. Here they will be taught the ways of white Christian Australia and how to work for upper-class families as domestics. But the fiercely independent Molly is sickened by the repressive mission. She grabs Daisy and Gracie, and the three make their escape. Trailing the enormous rabbit-proof fence (built to save Australia from a crippling rabbit plague) that cuts across the nation, the girls begin a 1,500-mile journey home, pursued by authorities and the chief protector of Aborigines, Mr. A.O. Neville (played superbly by Kenneth Branagh, who adds depth and texture to a role that easily could have become a demonized stereotype). Although it is a film steeped in politics, one of the finest aspects of "Fence" is its universality. This is a movie about innocence subsumed by outside forces and essentially children in danger, making it a visceral, instantly engrossing film that works from an emotional, rather than dryly intellectual, base. Noyce puts you inside the plight of his central protagonists, taking the audience on an adrenalized ride that totally skirts the potential preaching a subject like this could have inspired. Tightly made and richly rewarding (and to be distributed in America by Miramax, which excels with this kind of product), expect "Fence" to cross over to a mainstream audience. This is a powerful film that speaks in universal terms about an important issue while going straight for the heart.
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson November 27 - December 3, 2002 - The political and physical facts of Rabbit-Proof Fence, Phillip Noyce's first Australian film in 13 years, are so stunning that Noyce looks like a genius for simply getting out of their way. The 200-year-long cultural smackdown between European settlers and the eventually decimated Aboriginal society can be boiled down to systematic enslavement. What was at first supremacist opportunism-kidnapping Aboriginal children from their families "for their own good" and training them as servants-became, in the case of "half-caste" children, official state policy. This program persisted, astonishingly, into the 1970s, but Noyce's film is set in 1931, when three girls, aged 14, 10, and eight, were snatched from their family and sent to a slave camp 1200 miles away. Indignant, they escaped, walking for months back north along the titular, continent-dividing fence, one step ahead of the law. Based on a memoir by a grown daughter of the eldest girl and rarely digressing from the journey itself, the movie is a dusty, calloused, primal Odyssey, as forceful and single-minded as a bullet train. At the very least, it lays waste to the memory of Nicolas Roeg's famous, hippie-dippie kids-in-the-Outback benchmark Walkabout (1971); here, Roeg's native-mascot David Gulpilil plays the government's near-mute wilderness tracker, hunting his countrymen despite his family's own destruction by white power. Like last year's Atanarjuat, Rabbit-Proof Fence is made elemental by completely unaffected amateur performances (as the three willful girls, Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan are indelibly haunted, vigilant, and bitter) and a freshly imagined relationship with landscape. The Australian outlands, photographed by Christopher Doyle (who also shot Noyce's other current release, The Quiet American), become a natural anvil for human suffering, and the unforgettable image of ragged children adrift in the desert is often compressed into an apocalyptic frieze traversed by Giacomettian refugees. The trio-two sisters and a cousin, named Molly, Daisy, and Gracie-are a particularly fierce variety of lost girl, and the film is compelling as a metaphoric flight from an unnatural, and unjust, maturity. Noyce, fresh from a half-dozen of the dumbest Hollywood films of the last decade (including Patriot Games, The Saint, and The Bone Collector), lets a few unnecessary intimations of supernatural hooey leak in, and often the action isn't developed dramatically so much as merely photographed beautifully. (The scenes featuring earnest, miscegenationist bureaucrat Kenneth Branagh managing the recovery operation feel a bit canned.) But Noyce knows that the tale naturally exudes near-mythic outrage, and all he need do is focus on the little fugitives' battered feet and empty eyes. Climaxing with the visages of the very real Molly, age 85, and 79-year-old Daisy today, and the cold news that their children were, in turn, absconded with by the system, Rabbit-Proof Fence howls with righteous political dudgeon.
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