Grade: B+

Verdict: Fool-proof movie.

Details: Starring Everlyn Sampi and Kenneth Branagh. Directed by Phillip Noyce. Rated PG but there are some scenes too intense for young children. 1 hour, 25 minutes.

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Review: The long walk home depicted in Phillip Noyce's indelible film, “Rabbit- Proof Fence,” is the sort of inspirational heart-tugger Hollywood couldn't possibly make up. That's because it's true.

From about 1910 to 1971, a program existed in Australia, mandating that half-caste aboriginal children — most of them fathered by the itinerant white workers who built the titular fence — could be forcibly taken away from their mothers and sent to “education camps,” where they would be taught enough simple skills to become useful domestics for whites. As is so often typical of white-supremacy lunacy (when they don't move on to lynchings and ovens), A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), the head of the program, sincerely believed he was doing this for the aborigines' own good. In the movie, he actually says, “In spite of himself, the native must be helped.”

In 1931, when the film begins, 14-year-old Molly Craig (Everlyn Sampi), her 8-year-old sister, Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) and their 10-year-old cousin, Gracie Fields (Laura Monaghan), are living in a remote town called Jigalong with their mothers. (The white fathers are long gone.) In a scene that ranks with Bambi's mother as far as parent-child nightmares are concerned, they are wrenched from their home and taken to a camp 1,200 miles away. The place looks like something out of “Oliver Twist,” and after a condescending visit by Neville (there to sort out the lighter-skinned children, who, presumably, are smarter and therefore can be taught to read and write), Molly has had enough. She takes off for home, with Daisy and Gracie trailing behind her.

So begins their incredible journey. Their only compass is the rabbit-proof fence, completed in 1907 and the longest on earth. (The name seems ironic because the side that's being protected looks as barren and unfit for cultivation as the bunnies' side.) It's a dusty, rock-strewn umbilical cord, a muddy, desolate yellow brick road, along which they encounter both friend and foe. Even Lassie had it easier.

They must contend with rough weather, starvation, lack of water and Neville, who somehow takes their homeward journey as a personal affront that could seriously hurt his breeding program. (Well, that's what it is.) He sends his best men after them, including an aborigine named Moodoo (David Gulpilil, whose beautifully sculpted and weathered face makes him almost unrecognizable as the boy who starred in 1971's “Walkabout.” ) Moodoo comes to respect his quarry more than his bosses. Noting one of Molly's tricks to cover their tracks, he says admiringly, “She very clever this girl. She wants to go home.”

Noyce's cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, who also shot Noyce's very fine “The Quiet American” (which opens in wider markets next month), captures both the raw, natural splendor of the land and its moody mysticism. A shot that silhouettes a helpful farmer and her children against an impossibly blue sky is like something out of a John Ford movie.

In a way, “Rabbit-Proof Fence” harkens back to that remarkable generation of Aussie directors who emerged in the late '70s — Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi and Noyce himself — whose films exuded a freshness and vigor Hollywood hadn't seen in years.

Branagh wisely underplays Neville's thin-lipped smugness. And Sampi is a natural whose fierce confidence and stubborn sense of what's right for her and her charges is all the more impressive in that she's a non-professional. She's a kind of hero we haven't seen much of — tough-minded and wary of everyone, even those who help her.

The movie may sound like a yawn: Three girls walk through wind and rain and scrub brush to get back where they belong. But it's not. “Rabbit-Proof Fence” is one of those primal movies that stir up inchoate emotions about home and family and injustice and freedom. We've probably all been a Molly at one moment or another in our lives. Or wish we had been.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service