If this sounds familiar, it should. The American government did the same thing to American Indians, except without the creepy eugenics twist: the Australian government believed that, while the natives were essentially beyond saving, half-castes could be “reformed,” brought up in Christian society and married to whites. One of the squirmiest scenes in the film is a presentation to a group of Christian ladies showing how, within two generations, the Aboriginal features can be “bred out.”
(As you’d expect, Australians are out of touch with this shameful part of their history and reluctant to face up to it. Apologists said that “the Aboriginal camps were squalid places, and half-castes would have been in danger from territorial ‘full-blood’ tribesmen. And the girls didn’t travel to the reservation by train, they went by steamship and had a lovely time. And they got a free education, too.” Ah, yes, the lovely steamship ride made them forget all about being ripped out of their mothers’ arms.)
As I mentioned, much of this made me think of the similar situation with the Indian schools in our country, and as I did a little more research on the movie and its context, I found an interesting and chilling line in one newspaper article. The daughter of one of the girls portrayed in the movie, Doris Pilkington Garimara, who wrote the book upon which the movie is based, says that the film has received a remarkable response around the world, in large part because every country seems to have a comparable story about a “stolen generation.” (Garimara also notes that, sadly, her sister and one of the girls depicted in the film were raised as white and refuse to acknowledge much less contact, their true, Aborigine families.)
Rabbit-Proof Fence is the story of three girls, Molly, Gracie, and Daisy (all three girls, Everlyn Sampi, Laura Monaghan, and Tianna Sansbury, are terrific, natural actresses, and two of the real-life girls, now in their mid-eighties, appear in a wonderful, touching epilogue), stolen from their mothers and packed off to a dismal boarding school. Led by clever, determined Molly, the girls escape and start to trek the 1,200 miles back home along the rabbit-proof fence (itself a ludicrous act of hubris to contain a man-made problem – the government actually built a fence that ran from coast to coast, north to south, 1,500 miles long, to keep rabbits contained in one part of the country). They’re hunted by the police and an Aboriginal tracker (David Gulpilil, who seems to be the Aborigine film industry – he’s been in every film featuring Aborigines that I can remember, from Walkabout to The Last Wave – even Crocodile Dundee – and in those that don’t – he’s the mystic native encountered by a couple of the astronauts monitoring John Glenn’s orbit in The Right Stuff).
It’s a little puzzling why so much effort is expended on chasing down these three little girls. In fact, the movie suggests that the only reason they didn’t spark a full-out manhunt was a tight budget. Bureaucratic bean-counters may have been the girls’ saving grace.
As the main bureaucrat, Kenneth Branagh foregoes the easy stereotype of the pompous, twittish Brit and manages to make his inherently hateful Chief Protector seem more like a well-intentioned fool than truly evil. He believes all that White Man’s Burden bosh, but he thinks he’s doing the best thing for the girls’ welfare – when he talks of them and his other “charges,” it’s with genuine (if unimaginably misdirected) concern, not a sneer or a grimace.
Can we forgive director Phillip Noyce for Sliver and The Saint? In recent interviews, he refers to his post-Dead Calm career in Hollywood as “the sausage factory.” With this movie and the highly regarded, soon-to-be-released The Quiet American, he seems to be making amends. However, I wonder if his years of churning out generic thrillers haven’t taken something from him. Rabbit-Proof Fence is elegant, beautiful, moving – and yet somehow seems uninspired. It feels like any competent director, handed this compelling story and these extraordinary young actresses, could have done as good a job. There’s nothing personal about it, no special vision or artistry. However, it’s well supported by Peter Gabriel’s haunting score and cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s (Won Kar-Wai’s frequent cinematographer) gorgeous shots of the sere landscape that makes the desert seem at once beautiful and cruelly barren.
But how much more heartfelt would this movie have been in the hands of an Aborigine? I hope some outfit in Australia is encouraging an Aborigine film industry as The Fast Runner’s crew is doing with the Inuits.
As the audience left the theater, I overheard the woman behind
me marveling
smugly at the backwardness of Australians – one of her comments was,
“Oh
my god, talk about Trent Lott!” (Uh, actually, I’ve reached my
quota
for the day, but thanks for the invitation.) I suppose someone
will
have to make a movie about the American Indian schools so she’ll
realize
this country is in no position to judge.
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