Haunting, heartbreaking 'Fence'

Kenneth Branagh plays one of those misguided altruists blinded by their own smothering paternalism.

Review: Rabbit-Proof Fence
Genre: Drama
MPAA rating: PG (for emotional thematic material)
Running time: 1:34
Release date: 2002
Cast: Kenneth Branagh, David Gulpilil, Deborah Mailman, Jason Clarke,
Ningali Lawford
Directed by: Phillip Noyce

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is a Down Under "Hansel & Gretel" in which the baddie isn't a wicked witch but rather anyone in a uniform.

Visually beautiful and emotionally draining, it is not to be missed.

Director Philip Noyce's film tells a story so simple, elemental and thrilling that it seems to exist in the world of myth rather than in day-to-day reality. You could almost regard it as a fairy tale or an old clan story told around a campfire, except that it's true.

For most of the 20th century, the Australian government routinely tore mixed-blood Aborigine children (usually a result of sex between Aborigine women and white laborers in the Outback) from their clans and placed them in group homes where, it was believed, exposure to the white man's ways would wean them of their "primitive" desires.

The idea was to drill the "blackness" out of them; they would be educated and take jobs (often as servants in white households), and each generation of their children would be progressively "whiter."

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is the true story of three little girls who in the early 1930s were forcibly snatched from their mother and grandmother and taken 1,200 miles to a "school" that resembles a concentration camp. There the children were told to abandon all the traditions they had known as Aborigines; to learn English, practice Protestantism and take up domestic crafts.

Rather than succumb to the white man's wishes, the three little girls escape.

The oldest, 14-year-old Molly (Everlyn Sampi), takes charge. Though they have no maps or provisions, she leads her 8-year-old sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and their 10-year-old cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan) on a trek that will cross the continent. They will follow the 1,000-mile-long fence erected years before to keep rabbits from overrunning agricultural land. (There's no small irony in this; clearly, the Australian government viewed the nomadic Aborigine as an ungovernable pest.)

These three children will elude trackers and police, survive by their wits and find assistance from other Aborigines living in - but not necessarily liking - the white man's world.

Among the children oral communication is largely unnecessary. The girls - portrayed by first-time actresses who perform with unforced naturalism and restraint - rely more on their survival instincts than their language skills.

The one person who talks incessantly in this film is A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), the bureaucrat behind this policy of government-sponsored kidnapping and one of those misguided altruists blinded by their own smothering paternalism.

Director Noyce (best known for Tom Clancy films like "Clear and Present Danger" and "Patriot Games" and the Aussie thriller "Dead Calm") and screenwriter Christine Olsen adapted a nonfiction book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, granddaughter of one of the three girls; in so doing they have wrought a haunting and heartbreaking minimalist tale.