I had never seen Out of Africa before, and I really wanted to love it. I am a fan of Sydney Pollack as a director. I am a fan of Meryl Streep and I am a fan of Robert Redford. One of the reasons I had shied away from seeing this picture until now was because it always looked like it would be kind of boring, and unfortunately my fears were confirmed. I did like Out of Africa, and I thought it was a well-made and well-crafted film. It has a lot of depth to the story and is thematically very strong. But it is too long and too slow and too meandering for my taste.
This is what I liked about Out of Africa.
I liked the thematic elements of the film, although I feel that the script was a little too on the nose with them. This is a film about dealing with the consequences of your actions and understanding that for all thins there is a price. The film begins with Karen (Streep) suggesting a marriage of convenience to Baron Bror Blixen. It should work out well for both of them, as Karen will get the title of Baroness and Bror will get access to her money since he’s run through all of his. They agree to purchase a dairy farm in Kenya, which at the time (early 20th Century), was under British rule. Karen finds out almost immediately that there could be a steep price to pay in this relationship as Bror decides to turn the farm into a coffee plantation instead without consulting her. She pays an even steeper price later on when she contracts syphilis from him due to his philandering.
Karen pays another price later in the film after she falls in love with Denys Finch-Hatten, a big game hunter who is the type of man who can’t be tied to any one place for very long. The price she pays for falling in love with him is allowing him to continue to live his life the way he wants. He’ll always love her, but he’ll never be able to settle down with her. Whether or not she’s able to pay that price will determine how happy she can be.
I liked Meryl Streep in this film. It’s hard to not like Meryl Streep in any film she’s in, but she is particularly outstanding in Out of Africa with her Dutch accent, her subtle emotions and her quiet determination. Meryl Streep would join Clark Gable (Mutiny on the Bounty, It Happened One Night, Gone With the Wind), Talia Shire (The Godfather, The Godfather Part 2, Rocky) and Diane Keaton (The Godfather, The Godfather Part 2, Annie Hall) as a star of three Best Picture winners. Even though she played more supporting roles in The Deer Hunter and Kramer Vs. Kramer, she was still an integral part of both of those films, and when combined with other powerful films that she had already starred in like Silkwood and Sophie’s Choice among many others, Streep used Out of Africa to continue her steady climb towards becoming one of Hollywood’s all-time greats.
Statistics aside, Streep’s performance of Karen in Out of Africa is sublime. How many times have you watched a film and an actor has a hard time managing an accent, be it an English accent or a Boston accent or a New York accent. There will be scenes where the accent isn’t realistic or drops entirely. Streep performed this film with a Dutch accent, which is one of the more difficult accents to get right because it very easily could slip into a German accent. That doesn’t happen with Streep. They darkened her hair, and made her look older than she was at the time, and combined with the accent, Streep transformed into Karen so that I really felt that I was watching a character, and not an actor playing that character.
One of the things that I truly loved about Streep’s performance in Out of Africa was its subtlety. This was a dignified woman that she was playing, who had to deal with hardship after hardship after hardship. There were many times throughout the film where a lesser performer would have succumbed to melodrama, cursing and shaking her fists at the world. I’m certain that Pollack had a thing or two to do with her performance as well, but there was none of that in this film. This is a woman who has brought a lot of her problems on to herself (more on that in a little bit), but she has a lot of problem throughout the film. There are three especially devastating things that happen to Karen in this film, and I’m sure there must have been at least some temptation to push the emotion and the melodrama, but they wisely avoided it. Streep would receive one of her astounding 17 Academy Award nominations for her work on this film, and she probably should have gone home with the statue for Best Actress that year.
I liked Robert Redford as Denys. This is probably not one of Redford’s most memorable roles, and he was not nominated for Best Actor, but he was perfect for it. To me, this role was reminiscent of his role of Hubbell in The Way We Were, although he’s a much more confident man in Out of Africa. To me the similarities come from each man’s inability to commit. Denys is a free spirit who loves to live the life of a big game hunter in the wilds of Africa. He doesn’t feel the need to have an official piece of paper in order to prove that he loves someone, and he expects that the woman who loves him will respect the fact that ne needs his freedom. If she can’t commit to that, then he can’t commit to her. This all comes to a head with Karen, who at first either believed that she could live with it or that she could tame this untamable man. As symbolized at the end of the film, Denys is the personification of the lions that he sometimes hunts. He is majestic and beautiful and loyal, but is also wild and will hurt you if you try to get too close.
Again, Redford’s performance was subtle as well. I will submit to you that Robert Redford rarely if ever played a character that was susceptible to melodrama. He played most of his characters with an even keel that still never lacked for intensity. Denys was no different. He had the same reserved dignity that Karen had, but he wasn’t ever afraid to ruffle feathers with a wise-crack which helped to give his character the depth that it needed to be likable. In fact, I found Denys, despite his personal short-comings to be the most likable character in the film.
I liked the cinematography. It reminded me a little bit of Lawrence of Arabia with its sweeping panoramic shots and shots that were specifically designed to show how small the people were in comparison the vastness of that great continent.
This is what I didn’t like about Out of Africa.
It was too long. I mentioned a moment ago that I liked the cinematography, especially the sweeping shots of the African landscapes. However the problem was that there were too many of them and they started to feel redundant. I’m sure that the temptation to show as much of that footage as possible must have been impossible to shake, and it leaves us as the audience with an interesting duality. Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? I believe that it is, and that they could have cut some time off of the film had they been a bit more judicious in how many establishing shots of landscapes they decided to show.
I also felt that, overall, the story dragged, especially in the first half of the film. It did pick up quite a bit when Karen and Denys finally get together and their story starts to drive the narrative, but this is a boring movie through the first half, and I found it difficult to get engaged. I think one of the things that made it boring was the fact that Karen brought so much of her misfortune on to herself. It was hard to feel any compassion for her because she knew she was entering into a marriage with a man whom she did not love and who did not love her. I don’t know what she was expecting or what she hoped to get out of it. In fact, there is no motivation for Karen at all other than getting the farm running. But even that doesn’t seem like it’s anything we should care about because she didn’t even want a coffee plantation. She wanted a dairy farm.
There are some times in the film where Karen wants to teach local native children to read despite the protestations of the local chief, but even after she has them in school there is not tension regarding how the chief is going to react. It’s just something that happens and then we move on. The same thing happens when World War I breaks out. Many of the men leave to fight and Karen is told she can’t stay at the house because the army cannot protect her from the natives. She decides, against the will of Bror to bring him and the others fresh supplies. On the trek, they become lost and there are a couple of times when it looks like they’ll be attacked by local warring parties. But nothing ever happens, and so any drama that could have been built by the tension that never happens is evaporated. That is the ultimate problem with the first half of Out of Africa. Pollack and screenwriter Kurt Luedtke set up situations with the potential for tension and drama, but then don’t pay them off.
In spite of the praise that I wrote earlier on behalf of Streep’s performance, I didn’t like Karen as a character. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I liked her well enough, but I didn’t care about her as much as I should have. As mentioned, she brought many of her problems on to herself by entering in to this marriage of convenience, and she has no real motivation until the second half of the film when she wants to have a lasting relationship with Denys. In order to care about a character, I need to know what she wants. If she has put herself in a bad situation, I want to see that she’s learning and growing, and in fact we do see a lot of growth from Karen by the end of the film. She starts out the film as a naïve European who has no idea how the world works to a hardened veteran of life’s challenges who now knows that nothing comes without a cost. The problem for me is that it took way to long for the film to get to that point or to the point where her character was even starting to evolve. That made it difficult for me to engage emotionally in the film, and I felt like the film suffered for it.
Did the Academy get it right?
My initial response to that question is no. I suspect that this is one of those years that if the Academy had a do-over, the Oscar would have gone to The Color Purple. That is an overly long film as well, and it also has a bit of a meandering story, but it is a lot more dramatic and I cared a lot more about the characters in that film than I did about the characters in Out of Africa. The other thing that I liked about The Color Purple is that it has a surprising amount of humor in it to help balance out the heavy drama. Personally, I feel that film was much more deserving of the Oscar. Prizzi’s Honor and Kiss of the Spider Woman were also nominated that year. William Hurt won the Oscar for Best Actor as a homosexual in a South American prison for immoral behavior in the latter film which I think might have been just a little too edgy for its time, and might have had better luck had it come out more recently. My favorite film of this group of nominees, however, is Witness, and that’s the film that I would have voted for, had I had a vote in 1985. It won for Best Original Screenplay and Harrison Ford was nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal of John Book, the Philadelphia detective who has to hide out in an Amish community when an Amish boy witnesses a murder and Book discovers that his superiors are behind the crime. However I understand that Witness was not on the scale or scope of films like Out of Africa or even The Color Purple. Really, it should have come down to those two films in 1985 and unfortunately the wrong film won.