Best Picture: #58
Original Release Date: December 20, 1985
Rating: PG
Runtime: 2 hours, 41 minutes
Director: Sydney Pollack
Quick Impressions:
Autobiographical writing is difficult to do well. I remember once having a conversation with my daughter in the park about which is true, fiction or non-fiction. I told her, “It really depends. Non-fiction can be dry and limited. When it’s good, fiction can be far more revealing about the author and enlightening to the reader. Fiction can communicate enormous, profound truths.” Then a stranger helpfully approached and explained to me the literal definitions of fiction and non-fiction. My daughter, however, saw my point.
Several years ago, I wrote a memoir reflecting on my first two years at college, made turbulent by a severe mental health crisis and a disastrous relationship. In the first draft, I used pseudonyms for every character. Then at the end, I went back and changed just my name to Sarah. Suddenly the book became almost impossible for me to read. Just recently, I did a bunch of introspective, personal writing about my experiences on Jeopardy!. After that, I went back to editing my latest novel for publication. To my horror, I suddenly noticed that my fiction and my non-fiction have a huge number of themes in common. At the point where I picked up, the novel deliberately uses the model of a psychotic break to describe a supernatural occurrence. Yet the character in that disturbed state was using language and themes strikingly similar to those in my non-fiction reflections on Jeopardy!. I found this first jarring, then alarming. I thought, “Is that the way I’m coming across in those posts I wrote about Jeopardy!?” It wasn’t, though. (If you feel like an outsider and you long to be included, there’s a big difference between going to dinner with your fellow Jeopardy! champions and joining a cult!) I worried for a second that the intentionally disturbing tone of my fiction might have crept into my non-fiction. Suddenly all I could think was, “Mother, I’m frightened to go walking at night with Cousin Bram now.” (That’s Bram Stoker’s fictional cousin Lucy after reading Dracula for the first time just before I wrote that sentence.) Fortunately, my non-fiction did not read the way I feared.
How I wish I had read Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa! (My daughter and I intend to read it, but not before I finish writing this review.) Watching this movie, I’ve been so tempted to draw conclusions about Dinesen’s memoir, but I don’t know how much of what I’m seeing reflects the influence of the screenwriter, the director, the actors. After all, Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen) did not write this film’s screenplay. And it seems fair to assume that director Sydney Pollack (not to mention stars like Meryl Streep and Robert Redford) might have had creative input, too. So the movie is several layers removed from Dinesen’s actual memoir. Still, as I watched, I couldn’t help thinking about the way Dinesen was revealing her life to us. For one thing, even though the real Karen Blixen may not have written the movie, the fictional Karen Blixen (Streep) is pointedly narrating it for us from scene one. So even though it might not be the author’s authentic memoir, the film Out of Africa is (very pointedly) the carefully crafted memoir of a fictionalized version of Karen Blixen.
The Good:
My dad loves this film, largely because his name is Dennis, and ordinarily movie characters named Dennis turn out to be seedy creeps. It’s not true of every cinematic Dennis, but in Out of Africa, Robert Redford’s character (technically Denys) is a refreshing exception to a disheartening trend. My dad also loves adventure and the idea of traveling the world, exploring new places. So I’ve seen Out of Africa several times as a child.
But this was just my second time watching the film as an adult and my first time watching it well. (When my daughter was a baby, my husband and I decided to watch every Best Picture nominee from a given year. We arbitrarily began with 1985 and got no further, probably because I was preoccupied, worrying over her health and my own. Now that she’s twelve and watching and discussing with me, I can give the movie my full attention.)
Out of Africa contains dazzling cinematography that makes me long to travel there and learn to fly a plane. The colors are rich (verdant greens, vivid sunsets). The costumes offer layer upon layer of eye-catching detail (particularly the ones Streep wears). And at moments (like in that big, climactic flying scene) the score becomes absolutely gorgeous.
But the movie makes us wait (an almost uncomfortably long time) for all of this soaring romantic adventure. So before we even reached the Redford/Streep romance at the heart of the film, I was already highly preoccupied with the movie’s narrative structure (and with one conspicuous choice the narrator makes in particular).
When I watched as a child, one plot point always jumped out at me. It made such a strong impression on young me that it was, in fact, for years, the only thing I remembered about the movie. Basically, when I was a kid, my parents were watching Out of Africa, and I was watching My Husband Gave Me Syphilis.
For most of our viewing experience, that was the movie my daughter was watching, too. She was livid. My mother always used to tell me, “Bror didn’t do it on purpose. He was never in love with her. He’s just her friend.” So for a while, I tried repeating that to my daughter. Then I had second thoughts.
I don’t know if my mom was oversimplifying the situation for me, but watching this time, I find that take fundamentally wrong. Yes, Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer) is never in love with Karen. But he is also a terrible friend. And she’s not such a great friend to him, either. My sister went to her senior prom with her best friend. There was no expectation of romance. He’s gay. She knew it. Still, he hung out with her all night, having fun. They went to dinner, they danced, they had a little slumber party. No STDs were contracted. No lives were destroyed. They treated each other like friends.
It seems important to note that Streep’s character finds it essential to use the frame of her increasingly toxic marriage as a lens through which to tell us this story. (And the marriage is literally toxic. The union finally begins to dissolve when Baroness Blixen must poison herself with arsenic because her husband has given her a potentially lethal case of syphilis. I mean, with friends like that…)
The fictional Karen wants the audience to know that she conceived of her marriage in a very particular way. In the beginning, Streep’s voiceover narration tells us that she was involved with two brothers. She describes one as “my lover” and the other as “my friend.” My daughter found this extremely confusing. I didn’t understand her persistent confusion until our conversation made clear to me that she didn’t realize the full implication of the word “lover.” (She was thinking of it as “someone who loves you.” “Well, he didn’t love you very much!”) She also knew nothing about the symbolism inherent in marriage traditions (i.e. wearing white, a veil, etc.). And she had missed the fact that Karen marries her lover’s brother because she feels she has no other prospects. She gets a title and an adventurous life. He gets her family’s money to bankroll said adventurous life. Because of a lack of understanding of greater social context, my daughter hadn’t initially followed the way their marriage was intended to work.
Both Baron and Baroness Blixen also seem fundamentally confused about the way their marriage is intended to work. She says she wants a marriage of convenience, but clearly she doesn’t. Very early on, we can see that Karen does feel romantic love for Bror. (More than likely, these feelings are displaced, lingering remnants of her passion for his brother who jilted her. Inadequate online research reveals a telling detail that the narrator withholds. They are twin brothers.) She also wants children, and he doesn’t mind, but obviously it does bother him that she wants more from the relationship than he can give her. She always thanks him for being honest with her, but she remains less than honest with him. She wants a traditional marriage and keeps pressing for it with her actions and expectations, no matter what she says.
Meanwhile, his behavior devolves into awfulness. (In Bror’s defense, I will say that Karen is quite controlling and will not agree to let him out of the marriage until he behaves badly enough to prompt her to break up with him.) But his behavior is inexcusable. Henry VIII treated his wives marginally better. As my daughter noted, “I can’t stand him. He was sorry he gave her syphilis, but is he really sorry if he continues to do the same thing? Even if he doesn’t ever sleep with her again, it still seems rude. He’s disregarding her feelings. Someone could have seen” him leave the town New Year’s party with another woman, “and that would have brought shame on her. I understand that he has a life, but he has a reputation to uphold in the community and people he must care for no matter how he feels about them.” She’s right. If my mother were here, she might defend Bror, but I can’t anymore.
Over half the movie is devoted to their doomed marriage (failing from its inception). Why? From the opening narration, we know that the heart of the story is Karen’s relationship with Denys. Why does it take so long to get to their actual romance?
I’ve thought of two reasons. The more obvious one is that she (the fictive Karen, the narrator) wants to make sure that we get the point of her story. Her relationship with Denys is not just any romance. It is perspective shifting and life altering and in some ways a metaphor for her relationship with Africa itself. So Bror is there as a foil. His entire storyline is designed to showcase the relationship with Denys, to make that romance look more special, to prepare us to receive it and understand its full weight and importance. If narrator Karen simply showed us the Denys romance first, we would not appreciate how special it is, what it means to her.
The second reason is actually related to the first. In an early scene with Denys (the person the story is actually about), Karen reveals that she used to play a game back in Denmark. Someone else would give her a first line—any first line at all—and then she would finish the story. This tells us how fictional Karen thinks. She doesn’t get to choose the start to her story (and so we get an hour and a half of a marriage whose highlight is an STD), but as a gifted storyteller she is able to craft a captivating middle and strong ending from whatever beginning she is given.
There’s one crucial thing to note here, though. The first line of the film (the story fictional Karen is telling us) isn’t about Bror. It’s about Denys. That’s because Bror fails Karen in that way, too. He doesn’t even start the story. She has to propose to him to set a story in motion for herself. Yet the film opens with Karen talking about gifts that Denys gave her—items, experiences. This is because the ultimate gift that Denys has given her is the power to change her game and start her own story. All Bror ever gave her was syphilis! (Well…plus a title, a divorce, some very bad news, and an extra pair of underwear if she wanted it). The entire relationship with Denys is a gift, and so Karen starts her own story talking about other gifts she received from the man who was both her lover (who did love her) and her friend (who did treat her well).
Best Scene:
Both my daughter and I loved the scene when Denys and Karen sit on the beach, talking by the campfire about marriage. Here the film very briefly almost turns into a romantic comedy. Streep and Redford have good chemistry and are quite funny together (and separately). My daughter burst out laughing twice during this scene and found the entire interaction endlessly thought provoking. In fact, she started calling out ideas about the two relationships (Bror/Karen vs. Karen/Denys) that I had already begun writing about myself. (She also pointed out, “Bror would spin everything to be her fault. Denys presents everything as his own choices.”)
Streep and Redford are good in every scene they get together. (It must be refreshing after having a husband who’s always saying, “Well, give me some money; I’m off to pretend to be a hunter,” to take up with a man who tells you gleefully, “I’ve got a phonograph here. Let’s go play Mozart to some baboons!” Denys is just more fun, also a better conversationalist. My daughter is twelve and could not resist mocking many of their exchanges, but clearly Denys and Karen understand each other. My daughter found it funny that every time they began to talk about love, one of them mentioned death, but at the end of the movie, she no longer found that so funny.)
Watching their interactions in that beach scene, I started to think, “It’s too bad we couldn’t have gotten to this part of the story a bit sooner.” I’ll admit, however, that my daughter and I may have unnaturally prolonged the first half of the movie. I’m sure the film is not intended to be paused dozens of times. But my daughter could not stop sharing her thoughts on Bror. (When he tells Karen she is free to accuse him of anything, my daughter suggested, “Murder.” And she could not have cheered harder at Denys’s reply when Bror tells him, “You might have asked, Denys.”) She was also not a fan of many instances of misogyny and racism she noticed in the movie. (She derisively called the gentlemen’s club, “The Mustache Club” and cheered for the governor’s wife). We had to keep pausing to talk about all of that, too.
Best Scene Visually:
I like the scene featuring Denys I’ve already mentioned when Karen introduces her storytelling game. I find the use of dwindling light sources fascinating. They’re having such a good time that they keep burning through all the sources of light and moving on to new ones. Fire keeps burning throughout Karen and Denys’s relationship. (Another interesting thing is that when they sit together, they always switch sides at the table from scene to scene. They keep switching back and forth throughout the film. Their relationship seems like one long conversation, an ever-shifting exchange.)
Best Action Sequence:
This is cheating a little because the scene in the airplane is also the best scene visually. (I just wanted to talk about the visual symbolism.) If you’re looking for pure beauty, the scene of Denys and Karen in flight is gorgeous and must look breathtaking on the big screen. (I’ve only ever seen the movie on TV.) The score also takes off at this point.
The Negatives:
My daughter found Baroness Blixen nearly impossible to take seriously in the early scenes of this film. Now granted, she’s twelve. Plus lately she always seems to be polishing a routine for some standup career she has going on that I don’t know about. But she relentlessly made fun of Streep’s character for the first half hour of the film at least. All of her jokes about Blixen can be distilled into one observation she made. “She looks too fancy to be there.”
My daughter is right that in the beginning of the film, we see again and again that Baroness Blixen does not belong in Africa. She’s out of place there. She doesn’t understand Africa, so she conspicuously stands out and often looks borderline ridiculous. She’s clearly not African. She’s European. But even in the community of the European colonizers, she stands out because most of them are (very) British, and she is Danish. (That’s practically German!!! The community becomes markedly suspicious of her when WWI breaks out.)
But again, the fictional Karen Blixen is telling us this entire story. The film opens with her voiceover narration. She explicitly calls out for us key moments that will appear later in her story. (That way, we know to watch for them.) At one point, my daughter jokingly said, “I feel like a prophecy is being fulfilled before my eyes because all she has narrated is coming to pass!” Though trying to be funny, she was right. That’s the narrative structure of the film. Streep’s character tells us to watch out for certain key things (setting them up for us) and then we watch as the film knocks them down one by one. We know when we need to pay attention because we’ve already been told what to watch out for.
So when Baroness Blixen seems slightly ridiculous early in the film (obsessively carrying on about her valuables on the train), we must keep in mind that because Karen herself is the narrator, she is choosing to highlight these aspects of her character for the audience. She wants to point out to us that perhaps when she first came to Africa, she was a bit out of her element and ridiculous. What she experiences while actually living in Africa changes her. She matures and adapts to her new environment. She’s the narrator. We wouldn’t see anything that she didn’t want to draw our attention to herself.
I stress this because of a major criticism of this film I have heard over the years. I haven’t read up on this extensively. I just recall hearing people take issue with Out of Africa because it perhaps encourages an outdated, slightly offensive colonial viewpoint. (“Wasn’t it romantic when Europeans controlled Africa?” No, not for the Africans it wasn’t!)
But here’s the thing. I think the film is aware of its source material’s slightly offensive colonial viewpoint, and that it is actively working to present that (unintentionally offensive) story and deconstruct it simultaneously.
At one point, Baroness Blixen gets into an argument with Denys about the school she’s planning for the local Kikuyu children. My daughter asked, “How long has he been in Africa?” I didn’t know for sure, so she assumed, “Forever.” Her point was, “I think he gets the people there more than she does. She values them as people, but she doesn’t understand their culture.”
I pointed out, “She’s trying to improve them by educating them in a European system, not considering that might not be the best system for them. But you also have to be careful not to infantilize adults. She wants to give the Kikuyu people equal access to education to level the playing field for them, to put them on equal footing with the colonizers. Maybe she needs to make education available to all of them, instead of mandating it for their children.”
My daughter said, “I think she should provide them with education but do it in a way that works more with their culture. There needs to be a way for them to have a European education without making them forget where they came from or who they are.” She then admitted that she had no idea how to implement such changes.
The thing is, by practically equating the mysterious, beloved Denys (a character who is romanticized and never completely knowable or pin-downable) with the mysterious, beloved Africa, the fictive Baroness Blixen is essentially admitting that her views on how to interact with the Kikuyu may not be as enlightened as Denys’s. And by showing us this, the movie itself is highlighting the fact that any of these characters might, in fact, be very wrong about how to treat the Kikuyu people. (It even comes out later that Karen has another, less rational motivation for building the school. She has always wanted children, and now she can’t have any. So her decision to create the school might not be entirely grounded in rational thinking.)
Basically the movie shows us again and again that Streep’s character is often wrong about Africa. Just as she can’t control Denys, she can never completely know Africa. She can only admire its beauty and grandeur and cherish what she learns and experiences there. So since the movie admits that Baroness Blixen may not entirely understand Africa, can it really be blamed for mistaken thoughts and ideas Blixen has about Africa?
The answer is probably yes. I’ll admit that I’m the wrong person to evaluate a fictional work’s potentially problematic take on colonial Africa. I have been known to say that Chaka Khan was a Zulu leader, so I wouldn’t really look to me for enlightenment on this topic.
I remember when the film Winter’s Bone was getting Oscar buzz. Friends of mine from grad school were having a productive online discussion about the film’s problematic nature as “poverty porn.” When I read that, I thought in shock, “That never once occurred to me!” When I watched Winter’s Bone, I thought two things 1) This Jennifer Lawrence person is a surprisingly good actress. 2) That character is so brave! Look what she’s able to accomplish! My dad, meanwhile, spent much of his childhood in the Missouri Ozarks. His take on the film was, “Usually movies don’t give us such a realistic depiction of the Ozarks. I knew people just like that.” I never thought of Winter’s Bone as poverty porn. That doesn’t mean it isn’t. It just shows my limitations as a viewer.
A thought that did occur to me is that all of the African characters are shown as being almost entirely virtuous (certainly conspicuously more virtuous than the European characters), which perhaps is just as bad as portraying them as entirely vicious. Then again, Malick Bowens gives one of our favorite performances as Farah. Giving him a bunch of random character flaws would just be disappointing. Now my daughter, at quite a number of moments, did take exception to the blatant sexism going on in the story. She was furious when the gentlemen’s club toasts Baroness Blixen at the end of the film and kept yelling at her not to accept their invitation (just on principle). But you wouldn’t call a film misogynistic for highlighting realistic misogynistic conventions of a historical period.
My daughter also really liked “stupid Felicity” (as she affectionately called her) and wanted to see more of that character.
Overall:
Out of Africa is a well-acted, gorgeous film full of lush landscapes and beautiful music. It is also stands out to me because it’s not only an adaptation of an actual memoir, but it’s also the carefully told memoir of a fictional version of the author of the non-fiction memoir. Since I happened to watch it just when I was already thinking about the relationship between a writer’s fiction and her memoirs, this aspect particularly fascinated me. My daughter also loved the film’s attention to character development and praised the performances of Robert Redford and Meryl Streep (whose Danish accent and elaborate costumes equally impressed her).