Exciting, Romantic, Glorious
Year Released: 1985
Directed by: Sydney Pollack
Starring: Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Michael Kitchen
(PG, 160 min.)
Academy Awards (1986)
Best Picture
Best Director: Sydney Pollack

“Men go off to be tested, for courage. And if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness." –Karen Dinesen

Such a glorious film! The searing beauty and fierceness of the land, its peoples and beasts are but a backdrop for this saga of two independent spirits whose love for the land and their own independence is only surpassed by their love for each other.

They don’t make such epics like these nowadays. In fact, the sneering “consensus of critics” at Rotten Tomatoes, quickly living up to the first part of the site’s name, don’t seem to get it.

Though lensed with stunning cinematography and featuring a pair of winning performances from Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, Out of Africa suffers from excessive length and glacial pacing.

OMG! Now I remember why I started this website. To speak up to these insufferable so-called critics who would rather guzzle the latest trendy brew than sip a fine and leisurely brandy.

At least some have some taste, though.

This is a movie for people who will willingly turn over their souls for 2 ½ hour and revel in the slow, graceful and profoundly uplifting saga of a courageous woman and the emotional and physical landscape that would shape her life. –Marylynn Uricchio

***

Part of the film’s excellence is owing to the poetic and insightful writing of Isak Dinesen (1885–1962), aka Karen Blixen. The screenwriters not only used her 1937 book, Out of Africa, but also relied on Dinesen’s other extensive writing about her 17 year stay there as the owner of a four-thousand acre coffee plantation in the hills of Nairobi.

Incidentally, Dinesen also penned Babette’s Feast (1958) which was made into another very remarkable film, albeit without any big name movie stars such as Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. *(Well worth seeing, as well as getting one of Different Drummer’s own recipes from Appetite for Murder: A Mystery Lover’s Cookbook

***

Of special note is the luminescent, youthful beauty of the always excellent Meryl Streep. We have admired her in 2008”s Doubt , 2009’s Julie and Julia , 2013’s August: Osage County, 2016’s Florence Foster Jenkins, but have forgotten her youthful radiance some 3 decades earlier.

•••

A few scenes stand out among others of almost equal excellence. One is the quick and unconventional marriage plans Karen Dinesen makes with the brother of her former lover, a Danish baron who has rejected her.

“It all began in Denmark. And there I knew two brothers. One was my lover, and one was my friend,” Begins Dinesen (Meryl Streep) in a voice over narrative.

Suddenly, realizing she will have no life at all since she has failed to marry, Karen Dinesen proposes a marriage of convenience to the brother who is her friend, Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer). He has the title; she has the funds. The next thing we know, she is traveling to the African farm she has purchased to meet up with and marry Bror.

The train ride is interrupted when they stop to load some ivory tusks from Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford). It is pre WWI Africa, so no mention of the evils of hunting elephants just for their tusks. Such a brief conversation, but each word counts.

“I’m Baroness Blixen,” Karen tells him.

“Not yet,” Denys replies.

Later, when she finds her new husband has decided against the dairy farm they had planned in favor of a coffee planation, never tried at such a high altitude, and also which takes 3 to 4 years for a viable crop, Karen is furious:

Karen: Next time you change your mind you do it with your money.
Blor: They bought you a title, Baronessa. They didn’t buy me.
Karen: (to the native servant) Fetch some wine for my lover’s brother.

While that “Not yet.” comment from Denys doesn’t come true, his misgivings about the match do. Bror takes little or no interest in the farm, preferring to hunt wild beasts and women. The only real “gift” he gives Karen is syphilis, which in those days had a 50/50 chance of a cure though taking arsenic.

In the mean time, Karen has become friends with Denys and Berkley Cole (a astonishingly young Michael Kitchen we know from Foyle’s War fame). They visit her when she is especially lonely with Bror away again, and then invite themselves to dinner. Being proper Englishmen, they dine in style on the veranda, each wearing formal attire they have gleaned from Bror’s closet. She can’t sing, but Karen entertains them with her stories, fabulous tales she makes up spontaneously with a prompt from Denys, just as she used to do for her nieces in Denmark.

It is worth it watch the film just for this exchange. Karen weaves an exquisite tale from the sentence Denys gives her:

“There was a wandering Chinese named Cheng Huan living in Limehouse and a girl named Shirley …”

Earlier Denys and Karen had met again when she was confronted by a lioness. Denys, who has just happened along, refuses to shoot it at her command.

“I wouldn’t run,” he tells her. “It you do, they’ll think you’re something good to eat.”

After the lioness finally walks away, he says. “She wanted to see if you’d run. That’s how they decide. A lot like people,” adding after she tells him she left her rifle on her saddle, “Better keep it with you. Your horse isn’t much of a shot.”

The romance between the two develops slowly, with Denys’s critical comments about Karen’s desire to have a school slowing things down a bit.

“I want my Kikuyus to learn to read,” she tells him.

Denys addresses her arrogance with disarming humor again.

Denys: “My Limoges.”  “My Kikuys.” “My Farm.”  It ‘s a lot to own.
Karen; I have paid a price for everything I own.
Denys: We’re not owners here. We’re just passing through.
Karen: Is life really so damn simple for you”
Denys: Perhaps I ask less of it than you do.
Karen : (Always needing to get in the last word)  I don’t believe that.

But any women, even one with Karen’s stubbornness, would be won over on the safari Denys takes her on. The coup de grace is when he washes her hair.

Later, Denys gives her a compass.

…to steer by, he said. But later it came to me that we navigated differently. Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.

This exquisite film is a must see, even if you are watching it a second time. Our world has changed so much since Karen Dinesen’s experiences in Africa in the early 20th century, again since the time she penned her memoirs in 1937, and even very much since the filming of this tale in 1985.

Hers was a world filled with dreamers, striving and sometimes flawed, but they and this fierce and magnificent country that formed them, should still linger in our memories even if they no longer exist.

–Kathy Borich
🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

Trailer

Film-Loving Foodie

“He even took the gramophone on safari. Three rifles, supplies for a month, and Mozart.”

Not only that, but Robert Redford’s Denys George Finch Hatton – you know he’s English aristocracy with that four-part name – makes it one to remember for Meryl Streep’s Karen Dinesen Blixen. The great landscapes are filled with sweeping herds of antelope, Cape buffalo, elephants, loping giraffes, and lions. Yes again, lions. This time Karen has her rifle and she refuses to let Denys take them on all himself. The two of them stand their ground and come out alive.

That and an earlier scene of Dennis shampooing Karen’s hair is as romantic as it gets, right?

Let’s top it all off with an authentic Kenyan recipe, Nyama Choma.

Kenya Nyama choma is Kenya’s unofficial national dish, meaning barbecued meat in the Swahili language. The meat is usually goat or beef, served roasted throughout the country, from roadside shacks to fine restaurants. –Cat Black

Here are a few more African drinks and recipes for you to sample:

African Delight Cocktail Recipe (Safe House)
Spicy South African Lentils Recipe (District 9)
Tropical African Sangria Recipe (Blood Diamond)
Funeral Rice Recipe (Sahara)
Oysters Mombasa Recipe (The Constant Gardener)
Zimbabwe Bean Salad Recipe (The Interpreter)