Wednesday Movie - Out of Africa

It’s difficult to see a current movie and not already know too much about it. I love trailers, but more often then not, they render the set up of any movie almost meaningless. Mr. & Mrs. Smith—a great movie that I enjoyed a lot, but we all knew going in that the Mr. and Mrs. were assassins for hire, and it gave the first half an hour a real get-on-with-it feel. This is why I enjoy these Wednesday movies, because I only know most of them by reputation and what I think I know is typically wrong.

There were only two things I knew about Out of Africa before I watched it: it had won Best Picture, and it was longest movie in all of movie history. Turns out I was wrong on the second thing. I think my parents—to whom a ninety-five minutes feature is “some long, b’y”—might have seen this when I was young and I’d witnessed the fall out. At two hours and forty minutes, no one would define it as short and breezy, but it’s no Das Boot, if you know what I’m saying. So here’s what I didn’t know about the movie:

It’s based on the true story of novelist Karen Blixen, a Danish baroness who marries a man more friend than lover, and moves to Kenya to start a coffee plantation. Although Karen throws herself into their new home, her marriage, and a plantation she never wanted, her husband treats his duties cavalierly, choosing instead to hunt by day and philander by night. Fortunately, the baroness is unbowed in the face of adversity; in fact it even seems to strengthen her. She ousts her husband, manages the plantation, and even builds a school for the children of the local tribe. She then becomes involved with Denys Hatton, an enigmatic hunter who she had crossed paths with often since arriving in Africa. Denys has a deep-rooted respect for the country and its inhabitants, and he teaches the already-wise Karen truths about the natives (they have an oral history, why do they need to read?) and about living for the day (the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road). Their relationship seems ultimately doomed, if for no other reason than that every other of Karen’s endeavours ends in disaster. In the end, it proves true of this endeavour as well.

Meryl Streep is unbelievable in this. I know that she’s every actress’s idol, but prior to this I’d only seen her in Adaptation, where she was good but not holy shit good as she is here. It’s like she actually became another person for this movie; the posture, the demeanour, especially the accent (while I couldn’t identify a Danish accent to save my life, it sounded pitch-perfect to me). Robert Redford is also great, knowing better than to put on a bad English accent. He pulls off a difficult roll, making the land-loving hunter both sensitive and masculine. You get snippets of this character early on and you can’t wait until it’s just the two of them, and when it is it’s as good as you’d hoped.

This is not your typical romance. While it’s not quite a mystery, I truly had no idea where the movie was going from one scene to the next. I mean, the female lead gets the syph, for God's sake! Nobody saw that one coming.

It’s a good story because it’s based on a true story and because real life is complicated. It doesn’t just beeline from plot point to plot point, it develops gradually. That said, it’s also concisely told. You often get the sense in these types of movies that someone must have said, “No one will consider this an epic unless we make it really, really LOOOOONG.” But there’s no wasted time in this movie. I would gladly watch it again, and soon.