by Chris Marshall:
It’s taken me a long, long time (like, three days!) to
finish Out of Africa. This shouldn’t
necessarily be seen as an indictment of its quality, but I did fall asleep four
separate times while watching it. Rest assured, I went back and made sure I
watched every moment of it, even if it did take several attempts.
At its most basic level, it’s not a terrible film by any
stretch of the imagination. It’s a perfectly acceptable piece of cinema, and it’s
obviously the type of thing that the Academy loves. But it is so far outside of
my interests that it became difficult to focus on it for too long. It didn’t
help matters that I tended to try to watch it late at night.
The film is based on the novel by Isak Dinesen[1],
whose real name is Karen Blixen, and recounts the events of her life in Kenya,
which was at the time a British colony. Blixen is Danish, and at the beginning
of the film she marries Bror, which is a silly name. They aren’t particularly
in love with each other, but trifling things like that didn’t matter so much
back then. They were good friends and liked each other well enough, so why not?
Meryl Streep plays Blixen, making this the third Best
Picture winner she had appeared in since breaking onto the scene in The Deer Hunter in 1978. You’ll never
hear me say a negative word about Saint Meryl, but the Danish accent she spoke
with throughout the film just seemed a bit weird. I’m not well versed enough in
Danish accents to say whether it was a good
accent or not, but since we’re talking about Meryl Streep, I’ll assume it was.
The problem was just that that’s not what she’s supposed to sound like, and it
became distracting pretty quickly.
But where was I? At some point, Blixen contracts syphilis,
which makes her pretty upset, and she has to temporarily leave Kenya until she recovers.
All the while, she has been developing a friendship with a man named Denys
(Robert Redford), who disappears a lot to go on safaris. He’s a pretty good
guy, except for the whole “shooting rare African animals” thing. But then
again, I guess they weren’t so rare back then?
 |
| It just reeks of excitement. |
Anyway, Karen and Bror (what kind of name is that?) get
divorced, and Karen tries to convince Denys to marry her, but he’s not the
marrying type. He loves her, undoubtedly, but “I won’t love you any more with a
piece of paper,” he claims. I guess maybe he has a point. Then he dies in a
plane crash.
A bunch of other subplots were going on too, but they were
all related to boring things like deciding whether to buy a coffee plantation
or a dairy farm. And building a school for the natives. In the course of her
life, I’m sure these things were quite important and I shouldn’t be so glib,
but within the context of the movie, it was really hard to make myself care.
That was the main reason the movie disappointed me. Even
though the stakes were literally life and death at some points, it never really
felt like it. I guess that’s an
inevitable result of having a movie be narrated by its main character. You know
nothing too bad will happen because she’s still alive to tell the story.[2]
There was a certain wistfulness to all the events in the story, but there never
seemed to be a true sadness. At least when Terms of Endearment decided it was time to crank up the depressing-ness level,
they really went for it.
I fear that Out of
Africa will turn out to be one of those movies that, a few years from now,
I’ll remember having watched but won’t remember anything about it, and then I’ll
look like a fraud when somebody talks about something from the movie that I
have no recollection of. It just had an aura of forgettability. But similar to
how Karen Blixen never returned to Africa after she left, I have a feeling I’ll
never return to Out of Africa now
that I’ve seen it.
[Note: I realized I forgot to mention that this was the first Best Picture released while I was alive, and I didn't have time to find a place to shoehorn it into the actual article. It's totally irrelevant, but there you have it.]
[1] I
had heard of Dinesen but had no idea she was a woman. Her maiden name was Karen
Dinesen, but a cursory search did not reveal why she chose Isak.
[2] I
realize that films like Double Indemnity and
Sunset Blvd. are exceptions to this
rule.
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