Rabbit-Proof Fence

Chase films, as a rule, tend to involve as many speeding vehicles as possible these days, and while Noyce’s film is clearly of the hot-pursuit variety, it takes place almost entirely on foot, in the flat, dusty, dead reaches of the far Australian outback, in the year 1931. The quarry in question is a trio of young mixed-race Aboriginal girls – 14-year-old Molly (Sampi), her 8-year-old sister Daisy (Sansbury), and 10-year-old cousin Gracie (Monaghan) – who, as was the policy of the Australian government in regard to half-caste children, have been forcibly removed from their tiny village and relocated to the Moore River Native Settlement over 1,500 miles to the north. The young, heroic trio understandably chafes at their situation. The settlement – complete with stodgy nuns enforcing an English language-only policy, Western-style clothes, and a healthy dose of rigid, God-fearing Christianity – seeks, with varying degrees of success, to remove all traces of the Aborigine from its hapless charges. With its clapboard schoolrooms and sternly intransigent oversight, it’s like a nasty bit of Dickens transposed to the middle of nowhere. The government program is overseen by A.O. Neville (Branagh), a man who effectively was given complete control over the fates of the Australian natives. At one point he’s shown using a series of charts to illustrate how the genetic traits of the Aboriginals can be watered down to the point of nonexistence. His plan to remove the mixed-race girls from their homes is part of a grander (and altogether more ghastly) scheme to ensure that they do not marry their full-blooded cousins, the quicker to arrest their Aboriginal genetics. Echoes of eugenics abound in Neville’s crackpot theorizing, but the true awfulness of the story lies in history. Rabbit-Proof Fence is a true story (or as near as can be expected from narrative films these days), and so when the three youngsters take flight into the unforgiving outback, heading home by following the titular fence (erected from one end of Australia to the other in the hopes of keeping the lop-eared pests from the farmer’s crops), there’s a claustrophobic sense of history at work. (Even worse, the Australian government kept up its policy of sanctioned abduction and social re-indoctrination until 1971.) Sampi, Sansbury, and Monaghan are all making their screen debuts here, and their small frames, silhouetted against the sparse, almost lunar Australian badlands make for an achingly pitiful sight. Resolute and resourceful, they embark on a three-month journey, pursued by an Aboriginal tracker named Moodoo (Gulpilil) in Neville’s employ. It’s the least swift, most ploddingly determined pursuit I’ve ever seen, a grinding, sweaty wandering across some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. Noyce, whose work to date has more often focused on action/adventure (The Saint, Clear and Present Danger) has made a film of enormous emotional impact and subtlety, something I would not have expected. In many ways Rabbit-Proof Fence is similar to Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 classic Walkabout – both films capitalize on the alien environment of the Aussie outlands, but Noyce’s film is grounded in the dirty history of his native country. Its adult themes of familial separation and societal betrayal are head and shoulders above much of the director’s previous popcorn work – more hurt, more heart, more unassailable hope.