Rabbit Proof Fence (DVD)

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Starting in 1910 and continuing all the way up until 1970, the Australian government encouraged the placement of half-caste Aborigine children, willing or unwillingly, into training schools, where they were kept virtual prisoners while taught to be suitable servants for white families. This was done supposedly in the best interests of the children as a way of giving the disadvantaged indigenous population a leg up in life, but in actuality the policy was an attempt to breed out what the authorities termed the "third race." Moreover, it was done in the name of God by presumably well-meaning people. Sort of like the Crusades or the Inquisition. Dubbed now the "Stolen Generation" of children, this sore chapter in Australia's past remains controversial, the government never having apologized for its actions.

The 2002 movie, "Rabbit-Proof Fence," recounts the true story of three of these half-caste Aborigine children in 1931 as they escape their training center and embark upon a 1,500-mile trek back home, following a fence bisecting Australia to keep animals at bay. The script was adapted from the book "Following the Rabbit-Proof Fence" by Doris Pilkington Garimara, a daughter of one of the survivors of the journey. Interestingly, the child actors involved had never been in a film before, making both the movie and the story it tells all the more remarkable.

Australian director Phillip Noyce was no stranger to action films when he came to this project and used his experience to advantage in creating a heroic and sometimes heartbreaking story. After creating such thrillers as "Dead Calm," "Patriot Games," "Clear and Present Danger," "The Saint," and "The Bone Collector," Noyce might have been tempted to follow a typical Hollywood course with his material, but he appears to stick admirably close to the facts. It's a quintessential "small" film--small budget and small box office--but it is decidedly not small in terms of its human drama or universal themes. In these regards it's a very big film, indeed.

The Aboriginal population of Western Australia had never wanted the interference of the British, but the "Aborigines Act" soon controlled their lives in every way. A.O. Neville, played by Kenneth Branagh, was the real-life gentleman responsible for their care and welfare, ironically called the Chief Protector of Aborigines, the legal guardian of every Aborigine in the Western territory. He had the power to remove any half-caste child he chose from his or her family. Branagh portrays Neville as a rather humorless man whose actions he considers always for the benefit of the people in his charge, making him all the worse a tyrant for his blissful, misguided ignorance.

The three girls who escape his placement of them in a training camp are Daisy (Tiannia Sansbury), Gracie (Laura Monoghan), and Molly (Everlyn Sampi), ages eight to fourteen, who have been interred some 1,200 miles from their mothers. Luckily for the girls, they had been taught hunting skills before being taken away, skills that come in handy when they have to survive in the wilds while being hunted relentlessly by a professional tracker, Moodoo (David Gulpilil). The girls are helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, Aboriginal and white.

The movie's ambitions are noble, its themes substantial, and its vision clear. The intrusions inflicted upon the Aborigines by wrongheaded Australian authorities reflect similar injustices imposed upon other peoples in other lands, Native Americans, for instance, at the hands of the U.S. Government and white settlers. Moreover, the film's expansive cinematography reminds one of Nicholas Roeg's "Walkabout," although it never matches that earlier film's overall lyrical beauty.

As pure filmmaking, however, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" suffers mainly from its briefness. At little more than ninety minutes, the first third taken up with exposition and the final ten minutes with an epilogue and closing credits, the movie is too short to do much with characterization or conflict development. Once we're shown the girls' plight, it's an all-too-quick journey they make back to their mothers. The drama is real and never glamorized, and the ending, thankfully, is not sentimentalized, but the difficulties the girls encounter are not particularly intense.