Danish woman, Karen Dinesen (Meryl Streep),
moves to Kenya with her new husband, Bror von Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer),
where they intend to establish a dairy farm. However, Bror is more interested
in sleeping with the servant girls and big game hunting, so is away a lot, and
Karen must run the farm on her own, and conduct an affair with handsome game
hunter, Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford).
Doug says...
This was the perfect film for a Sunday evening.
I think I actually dozed off about three times and still grasped entirely what
was happening. It’s a soft drama, aiming to be an African-based version of the
BBC hit series Lark Rise to Candleford in which literally almost nothing
happened and there were lots of soft-focus shots of sunsets.
Unfortunately, a film approaching three hours
demands a little more plot, and we’re not really given that here. It doesn’t
help matters that only a couple of years ago we had the extraordinary Gandhi
which managed to capture a real sense of a very-far away land. Here Africa
is one of the main subjects - it is the catalyst for everything happening and
everyone coming together - and yet it never feels more real than a painted
backdrop. They’ve clearly hired actual African villagers to be in the film, and
yet never use them above fleeting glimpses as if to ground the action before
swivelling back to the rather beige romance between Karen and Denys.
The fact is that Karen and Denys’ affair in real
life was actually just a fragment of a far more interesting background. There
was a hedonistic and elitist group of largely British aristocrats in Africa at
the time, including Beryl Markham, the first woman aviator to fly solo,
non-stop across the Atlantic from east to west. Markham actually moved in with
Karen, set her sights on Denys and began an affair with him - Denys actually
ended up having affairs with both women simultaneously, under the same roof. A
tad more scandalous than the tame matter we’re offered here.
It’s not great stuff, and there’s real missed
chances - both with the plot (Markham doesn’t even appear, but is ‘represented’
briefly by a character called Felicity), and with the setting - Africa doesn’t
feel integral in any way, beyond a pretty backdrop. What I found most
interesting is Meryl.
Meryl Streep has long been regarded as one of
our greatest film actresses. But the appearances I’m seeing from the ‘80s, and
the stuff I’ve seen from the ‘90s doesn’t lift her much above her peers. While
she has some flashes of great acting here, it’s all a bit too held back to
affect us. In films like Kramer vs Kramer she was heavily out-shadowed,
and looking ahead she has the great campy classics like Death Becomes Her -
but nothing that makes her shine.
In fact a quick Wikipedia shows that while she
made her name with these soapy melodramas in the ‘80s, she lost top billing
fairly quickly in the ‘90s and it was actually her role in a certain
fashion-based film that sent her soaring back into the echelons of highest
Hollywood. That’s right - her career was flagging pre-Devil Wears Prada.
I, for one, had always assumed she’d just always been up there, but what
actually transpires is we are currently in the golden age of Streep’s acting.
She’s never actually been better than Prada, The Hours, August:Osage County,
Doubt - and my own favourite Florence Foster Jenkins. It’s actually
quite cheering to see that an actress who really got going in the ‘80s actually
hits her real stride in the early noughties.
The film? Eh, it verges on instantly forgettable.
It seems odd that it beat the seminal The Color Purple, but at least it
didn’t win any acting trophies. It’s not hateful, it’s just not…anything.
Highlight
Those
few moments when Meryl delivers a line a certain way or shoots someone a look
and suddenly you see a glimpse at the great actress that’s a few decades away
in the making.
Lowlight
Why
would you shoot everything actually in Africa and then somehow make it
all seem two-dimensional and dull? How?!
Mark
5/10
Paul says...
As Doug says, this is ideal Sunday evening
entertainment. It would be completely at home at 9pm on ITV, and have the word
“heart” somewhere in the title. But instead, this is the 1985 Best Picture
winner, so expectations are, understandably, a little higher.
The biggest and, for me, only strength of Out of
Africa, is its beauty. Director Sidney Pollack does for Kenya what Richard
Attenborough did for India and David Lean did for the Arabian desert in
previous films we have blogged about. He establishes a setting that is a
character in itself- visually stunning and perfect for Instagram, but also
terrifying due to its natural power over mankind. Scenes in which Meryl Streep
finds herself face-to-face with lions, and Karen and Denys’ lengthy flight over
the Kenyan countryside, remind us of this remarkable superiority that the
natural world has over humans.
But whilst the film is Beautiful (and yes, the
capital B is intentional) in that it ticks all the boxes to be considered for a
place in the Louvre or to have gap year students waxing lyrical about their own
experiences in this part of the world, Out of Africa is pretty lacklustre.
Which is a massive shame because Karen Blixen led a pretty interesting life.
The film shows her gradual loss of the farm and money troubles; her affair with
Denys; her contraction of syphilis from her husband’s own affairs; she
painstakingly brings resources to her husband’s regiment during the First World
War; she sets up a school and contributes more advanced medical care to the
Kenyan people. But the script and direction tackles all of this with such an
objective, mannered and understated eye that nothing lifts above murmur. A film
such as this needs to shout louder and have more to say.
Karen herself could have been presented as much
stronger and feistier to put the audience behind her and Denys especially gets
nothing to do except look handsome and be American. The real Denys Finch Hatton
was an English aristocrat, so it seems very calculated that Redford should
retain his American accent and act more like Indiana Jones, but with no sense
of humour, because it would make the film appeal to the less esoteric members
of the audience who may favour Mills and Boon romances over historical drama.
This tale of an aristocratic woman falling in love with a the grizzled local
hero is not what happened, nor is it told with a shred of fun or emotion. If
you want that sort of story, I would recommend seeing Katharine Hepburn in The
African Queen, Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, or Rachel Weisz in The
Mummy, all far more exciting and more deserving of notoriety than this.
Out of Africa’s mediocrity is further shown
through the fact that it covers about 20 years of history, but at no point is
this scale of time felt. I only found out by reading up on the real Karen
Blixen, and this was at a point where I thought the film had covered less than
half that time. None of the characters aged, nor did their fashion or hair
styles change with the times. Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and Gandhi
are similarly ambitious and episodic epics, but their sense of scale leaves you
physically and mentally exhausted by the end, much like the characters you’re
watching. By the end of Out of Africa, I felt nothing. I don’t think the film
even climaxed at any point.
To reiterate Doug, Out of Africa is not terrible
mostly because it’s lovely to look at. But like Instagram models, this is not
enough. There’s a deadness behind the eyes that makes it fit well within a
decade that is quickly turning out to be trite.
Highlight
Karen and Denys’ plane flight is actually
quite a lovely sequence. It’s captures the beauty of the African landscape and
it’s a shame the rest of the film couldn’t match this sense of awe.
Lowlight
A
lengthy dialogue scene between Karen and Denys on a beach in which they discuss
the future of their relationship is a prime example of why the film fails. Much
of it is just words, words, words, and left me with a distinct feeling of “so
what?”
Mark
2/10
No comments:
Post a Comment