This Oscar-laden movie version of Baroness Karen Blixen's account of her experiences running a plantation in Kenya should have set off some interest to read her Isak Dinesen books, but it left me uninterested. As a romance, "Out of Africa" is staid and conventional. The chemistry that might have sparked the commonplace flirtatiousness of its star Meryl Streep and have transformed it into full-blown movie rapture over love interest Robert Redford never materialized. Streep--the darling of Hollywood's nobility (considered by too many the best actress working at the time)--failed to bring Blixen to life on the screen, and Redford with his characteristically uninvolved manner pretty much left her to play to herself. (His was maybe the most sensitively rendered impersonation of set furniture anyone could hope for.) And to add insult to apathy, the writer Kurt Luedtke (He took home Oscar, too.) picks at the least interesting aspects of her stay in the dark continent. He skirts issues that might have fleshed Blixen out as a woman of her time and temperament. You never get the feeling that he has cracked the surface of Blixen's life, her triumphs and failures, her Christian beliefs, her commitment--albeit bordering on a kind of rich-white-woman condescension--to the natives she employed. And, considering that this is the era when women as artists are coming into their own and are receiving the recognition denied them in the past, it's appalling how little of the "artist" Blixen we get to know here.
What we get are David Watkin's pretty pictures which, if I venture to guess where Blixen would have stood on the matter, would be out of sync with how she felt about Africa. It should have meant more to her than wide-open spaces and animals on the run as helicopters fly overhead. The only people who don't disgrace themselves in the movie are the black actors, and you wish there was less of Streep and Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer (as her philandering husband), and more of them.
What we get are David Watkin's pretty pictures which, if I venture to guess where Blixen would have stood on the matter, would be out of sync with how she felt about Africa. It should have meant more to her than wide-open spaces and animals on the run as helicopters fly overhead. The only people who don't disgrace themselves in the movie are the black actors, and you wish there was less of Streep and Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer (as her philandering husband), and more of them.