It seems that Britain, too, had its Stolen Generation. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, thousands of children were forcibly taken from "troubled" homes and shipped off in secret to institutions run by the Christian Brothers and others in Australia, where they met with physical ill-treatment and worse. It's an obvious subject for a film, though dramatically speaking the problem is that we know right away how we're meant to respond. Weren't people benighted in those days, and isn't it sad?
Directed by Jim Loach (son of Ken) and written by Rona Munro, this British-Australian co-production tells the story through the eyes of Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson), a Nottingham social worker who took on the challenge of uncovering the truth. Her quest brings her to sunny Australia, where she becomes a virtual surrogate mother to several of the now-adult migrants, including the inarticulate Jack (overplayed by Hugo Weaving) and the defiant Len (David Wenham) who refuses to be treated as a case for pity.
We're told that Margaret's empathy allows her to feel the pain they've repressed; this stress on her suffering-by-proxy could seem dangerously close to condescension, or a kind of emotional imperialism. But thanks to the talents of Watson and Wenham, Margaret's bond with Len is the film's most charged element, an exchange where both sides have something to offer. There's the hint of a sexual challenge to his all-Aussie insolence, though Margaret (like the film) chooses to disregard this, looking past his swagger to the scared little boy beneath.
In one of the strongest scenes, he takes her on a trip to the site of his brutal bush childhood; here, they come face-to-face with a group of staid, unremarkable men, blankly unwilling to see themselves as the bad guys. It would have been interesting if Loach had delved further into the theme of how cruelty can mistake itself for virtue, but Oranges and Sunshine is mainly conceived as a tribute to the decency and endurance of its lead characters with results that are sometimes moving but often deadly dull.
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