Rabbit-Proof Fence
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Movie Reviews of Rabbit-Proof Fence
Movie Review: "Rabbit-Proof Fence" a harrowing tale of loss and courage
Summary: 5 Stars
Phillip Noyce's "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is based on the true story of Daisy, Molly and Gracie, three half-caste children in Western Australia in 1931. The Australian government continued enforcing until 1970 a law that allowed mixed race children to be removed forcibly from their parents and sent to boarding schools to "educate" them for a white world. The girls were trained to be servants and domestics. The whole system was similar to the Indian schools in the United States, where First Nations children were sent to be raised as pious, productive, educated young adults, but the system there too frequently failed. The plan was that the half-caste girls would marry whites or other half-castes and have the Aboriginal "bred out of them," as policy director A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh) explains to a local ladies' society. Daisy, Molly and Gracie are sent to the Moore River Native Settlement in Perth, over 2000 kilometres from their home in Jigalong Station. They do not last more than a few days before Molly, the ringleader, plans their escape through brush and desert, finding her way home by following the rabbit-proof fence, the longest in the world, that divides pasture from rabbit-infested bush. Neville and his men, including a skilled Aboriginal tracker, Moodoo (film veteran David Gulpilil) search for weeks in pursuit of the girls, and one is eventually recaptured in a harrowing scene, only steps from safety with the other girls.
There is very little in the way of dialogue, and although Noyce's child actors are all unskilled, there are remarkable performances and true moments of fear, desperation, and grief shine through. The girls' mother and grandmother are particularly effective at conveying the mind-shattering grief they must live with knowing that they may never see their girls again. In one touching scene, at separate points on the fence, thousands of kilometres apart, both the mother and the girls tightly grip the fence, lightly shaking it, as if they could feel the resulting vibrations and sense the others' presence there.
The cinematography shows off the dry palette of the desert, the spectacular desert sunsets, the shimmering wave of heat that covers the landscape. This film reminded me in some ways of the 1971 Australian film "Walkabout," which starred Gulpilil as an Aboriginal teenager, and follows two white children that are stranded in the outback with only Gulpilil as a guide. The "Rabbit-Proof Fence" score by Peter Gabriel is low-key and appropriately tension-filled, meditative and mysterious at key moments, with wisps of Aboriginal chant and song woven into a lush synth background, and reminded me of the excellent soundtrack to Australian sci-fi series "Ocean Girl" by Garry McDonald and Laurie Stone. The narration at the beginning and end of the movie was the most powerful for me: the real-life Molly and Daisy, now old women in bright clothes that are startlingly out of place against the backdrop of the outback they slowly walk through, tell how the story ended. And that was the saddest truth of all.
The included documentary "Following the Rabbit-Proof Fence" shows Noyce flying to remote outback communities looking for Aboriginal child actors, auditioning thousands of hopefuls before settling on the final three, Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, and Laura Monaghan, as well as the emotional journey for the temperamental star and the harrowing experience of filming the girls' abduction at the hands of a white officer. Pretty much the whole cast and crew was in tears and shaken afterwards, forced to relive the crucial moment that defined the "Stolen Generations:" the theft from their mothers' arms, some never to be seen or heard from again.
An excellent film that treats a little-known subject outside of Australia (and fairly unspoken within), with the fresh-faced innocence of children who beat the odds and found their way home across 2000 km of largely uninhabited, hostile terrain to the waiting arms of their family.
Movie Review: The Patient Crime Against Humanity
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is one of the greatest pieces of film-making I have ever seen. Philip Noyce's handling of the untrained young actors Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sainsbury and Laura Monoghan who played Molly, Daisy and Gracie respectively, and his light touch on the plot are truly spectacular. This film has an emotional intensity and an intimate scale which makes the grandstanding by other "socially conscious" film makers seem mawkish or banal by comparison. The performances of the actors is wonderful, especially Sampi and one hopes that this will be a turning point for three-dimensional aboriginal ensemble actors in motion pictures (although of course, this is Hollywood in action so any prospect of long-term social benefit has to be taken with an Uluru-sized grain of salt).As a record of what happened during the 60 plus year period (1909 early 1970s) when the Australian government carried out its policy of forcible relocation of part-Aboriginal children in order to "lighten the race" into extinction, this film is devastating in its impact. Readers who are interested can get a pretty good introduction to the issues by going to the Rabbit Proof Fence website.
I'd like to add a couple of things here to the points that have already been made about the film. First of all, one of the strongest points of the movie is that the villains of the piece (in particular Kenneth Branagh's A. O. Neville) were totally convinced of the rightness of their cause and the subhumanity of Aboriginal people.
Writing in the early teens, one of Neville's fellow proponents of child removal wrote "I would not hesitate to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring." This same luminary noted that Aboriginal women were "prostitutes at heart" and that all Aboriginal people were "dirty, filthy [and] immoral". It should be pointed out that similar viewpoints were held towards the urban poor during this time period in all European countries, and their white colonies. Social Darwinist thinkers cast these groups along with Jews, Slavs, blacks, Asians and Natives of any kind as human trash to be eternal servants to the master race or victims of the march of progress.
Secondly, on top of the forcible destruction of aboriginal families, the film also raises the issue of the sexual exploitation of young aboriginal women by white men. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the movie for me was when Mavis (played by Deborah Mailman), a "graduate" of Neville's school who is the servant and sex slave of a white farming family begs the girls to stay with her: "If you're here, he won't come back".
Mavis represents the implicit fate of many of the young girls taken from their families. These young women were a convenient and powerless source of domestic labor for settler families to recreate the master-servant power dynamic that Australians had supposedly rejected. Interestingly, a similar fate awaited some of the British evacuee children who were sent to live in Australia during World War 2.
The last thing I want to note about the film is that the real Molly (shown with her sister at the end of the film) felt that the film should have been about the greater tragedy of her life: ten years after she escaped from Moore River, she was subsequently recaptured with her own two daughters, she managed to escape again with the younger one (Annabelle) but was forced to leave the other (Doris Pilkington Garimara, who became the author of the book on which the movie is based) behind. Molly did not see Doris again for 25 years. Annabelle was taken again when she was brought in for treatment for an eye infection a year later in 1942. To this day, 60 years later, Molly has received no contact from her youngest daughter.
Movie Review: First rival of The Ring for best film of 2002
Summary: 5 Stars
Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyes, 2002)If Rabbit-Proof Fence is not the best film of 2002, it's certainly within the top three, and missed 'best' by a short nose. Noyce, who is known for directing junk, not to put too fine a point on it,(Patriot Games, Sliver, Clear and Present Danger, et al), gives us his first good film since all the way back in 1989, when he took the boating scene from The Talented Mr. Ripley and turned it into the brilliant Dead Calm.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is the story of three racially mixed girls, Molly (the hauntingly beautiful Everlyn Sampi in her screen debut, which has already garnered her at least one Best Actress nod), her sister Daisy (Tianna Sanbury, also a newcomer), and their cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan, and you know the refrain by now). Pitted against them is, well, all of Australian white society, and a select few aborigines as well. The three girls are taken from their home in Jigalong and sent to the Moore River camp for girls, sort of a twisted Outback version of a finishing school for indentured servants. The head of the camp (and then, through the magic of cinema, the voice of Australian white society) is Neville 'the Devil,' played by Kenneth Branagh. Despite Neville's veneer of civility, and the complexity of his feelings for aborigines ('just because they use Neolithic tools does not mean they have Neolithic minds,' he says to an assistant at one point during the film), the girls see through this façade right quick and decide to walk home, a journey of some twelve hundred mile across the Australian outback. In order to do so, they have to follow the rabbit-proof fence of the film's title, erected in the outback to keep the plagues of (British-imported) rabbits away from the farmlands.
The first fifteen minutes of Rabbit-Proof fence are some of the most difficult footage to watch ever filmed; Noyce's camera angles and rapid cuts are disturbingly effective during the scenes leading up to the removal of Molly and her cohorts. Horror film aficionados in the audience will immediately recognize the camerawork as a pastiche of trickery first pioneered by George A. Romero (the blindingly fast cuts are a trademark of Dawn of the Dead, and anyone who's ever seen night of the Living Dead will recognize the car-interior perspective of people beating on the windows from early in that film). So, perhaps, Noyce has learned something from his time in America. Too bad he didn't use it when making The Saint.
The film calms down from there, but stays on an emotionally high pitch throughout even when the pace slows down. The last hour of the film almost has to be slow by definition; it's hard to keep a pace up when your main plot point is three girls walking for over a thousand miles.
Perhaps the best thing about Rabbit-Proof fence is that Noyce doesn't take the easy way out and turn this into a road movie. The trek isn't used as an excuse for us to watch long scenes of the three girls bonding by firelight, nor are we given long intercut scenes of what's happening in the world around them (they pick up news of pursuit from people they encounter along the way, but cut scenes of their pursuers, and Neville's reaction to the continuing frustration of same, are kept mercifully short throughout). As a result, the movie runs barely over ninety minutes, which is just about what it should be. Noyce gives the material the necessary amount of time to tell the story, and not more.
Absolutely stunning. A must-see film for those who rightly believe there's something wrong with the Academy's heads for nominating the tripe they did for the Academy Awards this year. **** ½
Movie Review: Rabbit-Proof Fence Review
Summary: 5 Stars
Rabbit-Proof Fence, set in 1931 in Australia, brings to light the eugenic policies of the Australian government's attempts to "helping" Australia's interracial aborigines or half-castes. For almost 80 years the Nazi-like policy attempted to remove all half-caste aboriginal children from their families and place them in government camps to re-educate, convert to Christianity and give them a place in White society. The movie leaves one feeling with extreme discontent and maybe even confusion given the attitude of A.O. Neville in that he believes he is saving the children from themselves.
The movie tells the incredible story of three young half-caste children, 14-year old Molly, 10-year old Gracie and 8-year old Daisy as they are abducted right from the arms of their tribe and taken thousands of miles away to a notorious camp for half-castes. At the camp there are basically herded around daily and sleep in room sized dormitory buildings where their latrine is a simple bucket in the back of the room. There are not allowed to speak their native language and anyone is who caught breaking the rules is put into an outhouse looking shack as punishment, sometimes even receiving physical beatings as punishment. The three young girls stay isn't very long at all as the eldest girl Gracie, hastily leads them out of the camp within a couple days and on their way back to Jigalong, their home.
After learning about the rabbit-proof fence prior to their kidnapping, the girls use this fence to find their way back home. Their journey, however, is made quite difficult as the expert Aboriginal tracker Moodoo is hot on their trails nearly the entire way. The girls walk for months with almost no water or food across the scorching Australian landscape. The only solace they find is in the strangers they meet along the way. Even though very young, Molly is very cunning and intelligent as she leads the group back to their home as they evade Moodoo and distrust the people that try to trick them into being captured and taken back to the camp.
As an indigenous tribe that is being pushed out and/or being taken over by the ever consuming and expanding white man, I can see the relationship that the Australian aborigines share with the other indigenous tribes throughout the world. The expansion of the modernized world has forced all of these tribes to relocate, adapt, to a certain degree, or be somewhat influenced by the larger governing force. Some tribes are successful in staying true to their sacred ways while other have totally adapted to a modern lifestyle. The saddest thing to me is when a part of a tribe is forcefully removed from their home and brainwashed into nearly forgetting the past and tribal religions & beliefs only to return later feeling like they were never there at all or that they don't belong. In the textbook "Living Religions" (8th edition) in chapter 2 mentions Eliza Saunders, an Australian aboriginals who five children were taken away from her while she and her husband were job hunting. One of her children speaks of when they return home: "When myself and my brothers and sisters return home, we five sit there quite mute and just listen, observe. Because we were never there." There is no amount of apology or remorse anyone can have to heal the wounds created by aggressive colonization or inhumane government policies. Only time and forgiveness can heal those wounds. And there will always be the scare left for everyone to see.
Steven M. Christin
Movie Review: Aborigine struggle against a racist white Aussie Government.
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a very compelling story about the Australian Government policy from the early 1900's through 1970 to relocate Aborigine children to orphanages by taking them from their families and their mothers. What is lacking is the usual guns and bloodshed associated with genocide, but the goal is the same. To entirely wipe out a culture is the purpose of genocide, and bloodless genocide is no less a crime against humanity. In the case, the Aborigne culture of Australia is over 40,000 years old and maybe the oldest surviving culture on Earth. Gracie, Daisy, and Molly did not cooperate with this plan of the "master race," and ran away. This was the start of a 1,500 mile walk home. Three little girls knew that if they found the rabbit proof fence that stretched across Australia and headed north, they would end up at home. This is a stretch of land that is one of the most forbidding on the planet.This is the story about the "lost generations." Both the trek home and committing this wonderful story of survival against wrong were monumental tasks. Director Phillip Noyce conducted numerous auditions with aborigne girls. After he makes his selections, he warns them, like any good grandfather, to not get spoiled. Like other grandfathers, he then proceeds to spoil what seems to be his three adopted grandchildren. A less kind hearted Director would not be able to pull off what this movie accomplishes. The special features of the DVD documents how the film crew became like a family, with all of the playfullness, teasing, tears, arguments and making up of a real family (or tribe). When the scene was shot for the movie of the girls being taken away from their families, there were tears and charged emotions put on film. When the scene ended and the cameras stopped, the crew had to take a prolonged break because the emotions hadn't stopped. Aboriginal actresses and acting coaches along with the white crew had to hug and cry all the way out what they had started. Later, when you see the aborigine girls during informal play and interaction with others, it is easy to recognize the similarities to the little princess daughter or grand daughter you may have at home.
Please don't miss the deeper levels of this movie. If you look deeper, there is quite a statement within this movie about motherhood, daughterhood, and sisterhood. Perhaps, even a mother nature/earth statement. A full response to the governments question of intelligence is a challenge to come up with a universal standard. Is intelligence quotations from Shakespeare while undergoing death by thirst, starvation and elements in the outback? Or is it squeezing the water from roots of plants, catching, roasting and eating giant lizards or eating beetle larva. I know exactly whom I want to be with in the outback. It isn't Sydney from Sydney. It is Gracie, Daisy, and Molly. It is Moodoo, the tracker in this film that is pretending to follow the girls but never quite catching them. Can you recognize him?
He is the same person that played the Aborigne teenager many years ago in "Walk About." He looks like he is in the same physical condition and ready for the next "walk about." I really want to see more movies like this highlighting Aborignal culture and the Australian landscape.