Artistic humility is the last trait you’d expect to find in a film about a subject as important and painful as the state-sanctioned displacement and forced assimilation of Australia’s indigenous peoples by the British imperial authorities. Too often filmmakers and writers either simplify the issues and the people involved into an easily-digestible series of emotional landing lights or suffocate under the weight of their own reverence. Whether the filmmaker wrongfully trusts the subject’s importance to provide the drama by itself or overexerts him-or-herself in making sure they and the audience feel important and enlightened, many films about massive human rights abuses fall back on prepackaged emotions and worn-out methods of inducing them within their audience, leaving everyone with, at best, only the superficial impression of having learned something.
Which is
why Rabbit-Proof Fence is such a
welcome surprise; aside from telling a story most non-Australians – myself
included – are only vaguely familiar with at best, it breaks no new ground and
offers no revelatory intuition into the workings of past or present systemic
racism, but unlike most films of its kind, it neither pretends nor intends to
do so. Seemingly aware of his own limitations, director Phillip Noyce tells it
not as the sobering history lesson most would have opted for, but rather as a
straightforward escape-and-survival movie whose story happens to be part of one
the most shameful and bitterly debated chapters of Australian history.
Based on
the true story of Molly Craig, her sister and her cousin’s escape from one of
the many indoctrination camps in which many mixed-race and Aboriginal children were
placed, Christine Olsen’s screenplay1 moves across its events at a casual
pace that never focuses on a single attention-seeking moment any longer than it
requires at the minimum. This means that the encountered characters, fictional
and historical, remain fairly simple constructs, from sweet-sounding nuns to a
sexually exploited Aboriginal maid, yet none of them fall into caricature. Even
A. O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), the
Chief Protector of Aborigines, despite serving as the film’s villain and
spending most of his time dictating orders at his office, is recognizably
human; his racism has the calm, rational appearance of benevolent paternalism,
rather than the moustache-twirling arrogance of the villains from Man To Man or Tom Felton’s character in
the otherwise admirable Belle.
The only true effort to further push the audience against him is a subtle,
systematic use of slightly skewed or lower angles to film him in every shot
above his knees, meaning that the viewer never gets to feel at ease with him by
being on the same level.
This
economical straight-to-the-point approach also means, however, that the three
protagonists get only a minimal amount of characterization to distinguish
themselves from each other. With Molly acting as group leader, her cousin
Gracie and little sister Sally are mostly defined by their compliance or
resistance to her enterprise, be it involuntary (Sally’s physical weakness is her foremost trait) or voluntary (at a crucial point in the film, Gracie sets
herself apart by choosing to go to a place where her mother is rumoured to be;
that act of autonomy and self-determination proves to be her undoing). That
is where the film’s trio of non-professional actresses comes in to further
elevate it: Led by a quietly effective Everlyn Sampi as Molly, the three girls
express themselves with a natural conviction that, while not as spontaneous or
surprising as non-actors from an Italian neorealist film, seldom feels
rehearsed or controlled. Like most of the film, they stand out by not trying
too hard to do so.
Anyone
who has watched a film shot in an Australian landscape, be it one of the Mad Max movies or even Baz Luhrmann’s
bloated cliché-ridden epic Australia,
knows it to be one of the most cinegenic lands on God’s Earth and Rabbit-Proof Fence illustrates this very
well. The country does not appear as strange and alive as in Nicolas Roeg’s
haunting masterpiece Walkabout, but its
harshness is felt in every close-up and pan. Of particular note is Peter
Gabriel’s score, which incorporates Aboriginal chants in keyboard-generated
string simulations to great effect, notably alternating between a spooky sense
of alienation in the indoctrination camp and comforting release in the climax.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is by no means a great or important film, but
its relative lack of ambition makes it infinitely preferable to more lofty-minded
Important Issue Movies. Like most films based on true stories, it takes its
share of liberties (the dramatic kidnapping
that occurs in the film, while a good allegory for what happened to the
Aboriginal peoples in general, did not occur in real life, as the girls knew
the authorities were coming and opposed no resistance) and some characters,
such as the ever-imposing David Gulpilil’s indentured tracker, are intriguing
enough to deserve more attention than they get. Nevertheless, its atmosphere
and three leads, Sampi chief among them, carry it beautifully enough to put
these quibbles to rest.
1Itself based on Follow The
Rabbit-Proof Fence, an account of Molly’s story by her daughter Dorothy
Pilkington.
