Visalia Times-Delta - 18 April 2003,
By James Ward

Until the early 1970s, it was government policy in Australia to take children of mixed Aboriginal race away from their parents. They were shipped off to orphanages, where they were trained to be domestic servants and farmhands.

Phillip Noyce's haunting "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is the true-life story of three such children. It's the type of the movie that will make you both angry and sad -- and you'll wonder what possessed otherwise decent government officials to devise such a heartless policy.

The architect of that policy was Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia A.O. Neville. He's played as a soft-spoken, earnest bureaucrat by Kenneth Branagh. It's that earnestness that makes the performance even more chilling.

Notice a scene in which Branagh lectures a group of smartly dressed women over tea about his long-range plan to "breed the colored problem" out of Australia. What makes it so chilling is the matter-of-fact way Branagh delivers the speech -- as if he's discussing a new way to file paperwork or process DMV applications.

The film is set in 1931, when three children escape from a government-run orphanage and make their way on a 1,500-mile journey across the Australian Outback. The three girls use a rabbit-proof fence, a mammoth barbed-wire construction built to prevent rabbits from eating Australian crops, as a guide to get back home.

Neville, fearing the growing press coverage of the event, sends out an increasingly large group of police officers to find the children. The leader of the trio, 14-year-old Molly (Everlyn Sampi, in a remarkable performance) proves a wily target. A child brought up in the harsh Outback, she uses every trick she knows to throw off her pursuers.

Noyce, who also directed the excellent "The Quiet American," brings an understated tone to the movie. There's no sledgehammer-type moralizing here: The innate cruelty of the policy is simply shown as a matter of fact.

In particular, a scene in which the three girls stumble upon a remote farm where an Aboriginal servant is sexually abused by a farmer is quietly powerful. Even at 14, the look on young Molly's face -- as she recognizes that her fate could be similar if she doesn't elude her pursuers -- is devastating.

That scene encapsulates all of the strengths of "Rabbit-Proof Fence," a film that shows that the evils of racism can be perpetuated by a banal bureaucracy as viscously as hooded thugs with burning crosses.

It's a stark lesson -- one that is as valuable in 2003 as it was in 1931.