Review

Review Date: 5-January-03
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

It is at once comforting and disturbing to realize that while the most egregious ethical misjudgments, errors, and even crimes can be obscured in the adult mind by ambition, erroneous theories, religious and nationalistic beliefs, and fear, they often remain patently obvious to innocent children. This explains the effect produced by "Rabbit-Proof Fence," a film which both inspires and disheartens with its true-life tale of a young girl with no formal education who takes one look at the patronizing, xenophobic, and essentially genocidal policies governing Australian Aborigines in the 1930s and promptly deems them utterly unacceptable. Of the several films currently in theaters which are based on historical events, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" may be the most astonishing --- and the one we'd do best not to forget.

The movie recounts the story of Molly Craig, who, along with her little sister Daisy and cousin Gracie, was taken from her home in northern Australia and transported to a camp for "half-castes" by the Australian government. (Their mothers were black natives, their fathers white immigrants.) The camp was one of several under the oversight of the "protector" of the Aborigines, one Mr. Neville at the time (played by Kenneth Branagh), who ardently believed that his charges needed to be westernized and even bred out of existence for their own good. Once interned, the girls were required to abandon all traces of their native culture and were schooled on how to become good Christian servants to the country's white population. Disobedience at the camp was discouraged by flogging, and runaways were tracked down and punished by solitary confinement. Molly, who was 14 at the time (1931), found this situation to be unbearable and escaped one morning with Daisy and Gracie in tow. She then led them on a 1,500-mile journey back to their homeland, entirely on foot, successfully eluding the perils of the tracker, the police, starvation, and exhaustion (although desperation did take its toll with one devastating loss). To make sure she was headed in the right direction, Molly walked alongside the world's longest fence, which had been built north-south through the entire continent in the early 1900s to keep an infestation of rabbits away from farmland. (In later years, Daisy told the story to her niece, upon whose book the screenplay is based.)

Director Phillip Noyce (whose "The Quiet American" is also in theaters) keeps things straightforward and simple, relying on the remarkable details of the story and the wonderful faces of the girls to speak for themselves. He found a real treasure in star Everlyn Sampi, who looks every bit as determined, intelligent, and patient as the real Molly must have been. (Sampi and co-stars Tianna Sansbury [Daisy] and Laura Monaghan [Gracie] are all Aborigines who had no acting experience before being cast for the film.) The agonies of the girls' government-sanctioned abduction and confinement are not sensationalized, but are shown to be what they no doubt were: cruel, misguided acts of conquest and bigotry perpetrated by educated, upper- and middle-class people who thought they were in the right. In addition, the girls' astounding journey is not overdramatized as a feat of unprecedented heroism, but is presented as the obvious, though arduous, solution to the girls' problem; they didn't like where they were, they missed their mothers, and they wanted to go home. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" speaks to the sin of parochialism, the basic human need for freedom, and the inherent strength of women, but in the end it serves primarily to document an extraordinary instance of common sense triumphing over injustice in the all too recent past.

Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.