Reviews: Sweeping Romances in Remote Locales
I read this book about two years ago; I found it a bit of a slow-go at first and then devoured the second half. The author/narrator, Isak Dinesen (a nom de plume for Karen Blixen) has a bit of that intellectual reserve (comparable, I think, to Joan Didion’s in The Year of Magical Thinking) and rather than be drawn into the story, I had to meet her in the middle; it ended up being worth it, in the end.
The only thing I knew about the movie version—other than that it starred the divine Meryl Streep and the also quite divine Robert Redford, and that it was on the list—was that back in 2000 I was in a women’s literature class and we read a short story by Dinesen. My professor (an awesome lady who later oversaw my senior thesis) recommended Out of Africa as a great read and then said, with a roll of the eyes, “Not like that horrible movie version.”
Now having seen it, I can answer as to what’s horrible about it. The answer is, objectively, nothing. It was beautifully acted (not that there would’ve been any doubt about that), the scenery was breathtaking (even on a grainy VHS copy). The love story sweeps one up, as love stories attempt to do. Here’s the problem: Out of Africa, the book, is not a love story at all. In fact, the character that Robert Redford plays is barely in it. He’s mentioned a few times, and his (SPOILER!) death is recounted, emotionally, by Blixen, as one tells the story of the death of a friend. The only reason the characters get together in the movie is because the real-life people were rumored to have had an affair (because of course Karen Blixen was married to someone else).
More on Out of Africa, and later, wolves are danced with.
So they made the story much more cinematic, I suppose, by throwing in the sex scenes and the lovers’ quarrels, and a tears-over-a-grave moment. What they lost was, to me, a bit more interesting. The plot of the book is a true account of Blixen’s life in Africa. She’s a Danish society woman who marries a man who’s a bit of a gallivanter, and her drops her off on his coffee plantation in Africa and then gallivants away again. She has to learn to roll up her sleeves, and manage a houseful of servants who barely know English and whose cultures are completely remote from her own. She has to try to save this fledgling crop (because the years she was there were plagued by drought) and she does it all in an environment where the Masai are her neighbors and lions are just wandering around.
The beginning of this movie portrays this vividly. Meryl gamely trots around, points to plots of ground and instructs her servants what to do with them. They ask her if she knows what she’s doing. She stiff-upper-lips them and moves on. Later, her husband visits. She tries to get him to engage with her on the subject of the plantation, to no avail. “You’re not going to help at all with the farm, are you?” she asks him, finally. For me, it was the most
poignant moment in the movie. But all that kind of drops away about 45 minutes in when the relationship with Redford’s character begins to dominate the movie. I would have liked to have seen more of her struggle with building a plantation from the ground up, with no support—more of what the book is about—and less about the relationship.
So, I was basically dreading this movie--and the first half was not actually that bad. There were moments that were over-earnest, just like I expected: the prairie worship, the overselling of the wisdom of the Native Americans. But it was not a bad story, and I actually admired Costner’s direction of it. The pacing is slow, for sure, but all the same, I kind of liked the “lone man in a fort” moments (this from someone who watches Cast Away EVERY SINGLE TIME TNT PLAYS IT) and the build-up to actual action was successful. Also, in the first hour or so, there were two moments where I actually laughed out loud. (1. When Costner puts on his full army regalia and rides his horse into the Native American camp, hoping to present a powerful image. He sees someone, tries to yell, and the American flag he’s flying slaps him in the face. He smacks it back in place, saying “oh, son of a bitch!” 2. When Costner offers sugar to the Native Americans; one really likes it and pours several cups of it into his confederate’s coffee. Costner says awkwardly, “Oh, that’s—that’s too much.”)
The second half was like a different movie; suddenly it becomes this love story between Costner and Mary McDonnell and the wisdom of the Native Americans is used primarily for matchmaking purposes: older members of the tribe say things like, “You are spending a lot of time with Dances With Wolves, no?” winking and nudging in this way that seems really out of character. Like, why do they care, really? They have bigger problems at stake. Costner even changes his look at this point: he shaves his beard, and his hair is longer and brushed back. In one scene he wears this flowing red blouse as he walks across the prairie with McDonnell and he looks like nothing so much as 90’s era romance novel cover artist Fabio.
Costner in the first half of the movie
Costner in the second half of the movie
Exactly the same quarrel I had with Out of Africa, I realize. A common thing with me, actually, especially about books that become movies. It just seems to me that people have a million stories to tell--some of them are so important, so compelling, so thrilling, so unusual--that to limit every story we get on the big screen to a man and a woman kissing each other and dramatically falling into bed just feels like a waste.
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