Review of Out of Africa (1985) by Mike M — 30 Aug 2008

There's never really any question of who's going to win our heroine's heart: Redford is so breezy he gets to keep his own accent, and the audience is invited to forgive him for it. With any other potential source of tension or drama deferred to an unspecified point on the horizon - the farm's coffee crops take four years to grow, the war never reaches Kenya in any appreciable form, and this Blixen has no deadlines to meet - and with the substantial theme of ownership only raised going into the third hour, it's left to Pollack to throw an extraordinary array of obstacles at the leads (local wildlife, Masai warriors, STDs) to persuade us there's anything at stake.

(It's the only film in history in which Meryl Streep is threatened by lions *and* syphilis.) The equation pretty pictures plus pretty music (John Barry) plus reasonably pretty people yields another acceptable wallow, and certainly there's a lot less to object to here than there would be in the equally long "Cold Mountain" - though perhaps because there's much less to it full-stop, save a belated assertion that if you love someone, you should set them free.

I saw it on a rainy Sunday afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep, which felt about right.