Out of Africa (1985)

Official trailer

Out of Africa is Sydney Pollack’s 1985 American romantic drama adapted from Isak Dinesen’s memoir, depicting a Danish baroness who establishes a coffee plantation in colonial Kenya and conducts a romance with a British big-game hunter during the early twentieth century. Meryl Streep plays Karen Blixen. Robert Redford plays Denys Finch Hatton. Klaus Maria Brandauer plays Baron Bror Blixen. Michael Kitchen plays Berkeley Cole. Malick Bowens plays Farah. Joseph Thiaka plays Kamante. Stephen Kinyanjui plays Chief Kinanjui. Kurt Luedtke wrote the screenplay.

Universal Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately twenty-eight million dollars, and it grossed approximately two hundred twenty-seven million worldwide, winning seven Academy Awards including Best Picture.

I find Out of Africa ravishing to look at and a little too pleased with its own dignity. Streep is terrific, the Kenya footage takes my breath away, and the biplane flight is the kind of scene I’d pay to see on its own. The pace asks for more patience than the romance always repays, and that’s what keeps it at an 8 for me.

The Memoir Adaptation

Streep reads Dinesen’s prose in voice-over for Out of Africa, and that narration carries the memoir’s literary voice into the film, bridging the book’s first-person construction and the film’s dramatic structure. I think it’s the smartest decision in the picture. Streep’s reading gives the whole film a remembered, melancholy quality from the start, and I’d take that over any amount of expository dialogue.

The screenplay reshapes the memoir’s episodic construction into a romance, emphasizing the Finch Hatton relationship that the memoir treated more obliquely. This illustrates how adaptation can shape source material toward genre expectations.

The Romantic Performances

Meryl Streep plays Karen Blixen with a Danish accent and an emotional restraint that lets the character’s intelligence and passion sit side by side. She’s the center of the film, and the performance earned her an Academy Award nomination. I think she’s the best thing in it. She can show Karen’s pride and her loneliness in the same glance, and she keeps the character from ever turning into a swooning romantic heroine.

Robert Redford plays Denys Finch Hatton with an easy confidence that lets his independence and his affection come through together, and his elusiveness is what drives Karen’s longing. Redford is charming, but I never quite buy him as a British big-game hunter, and the romance runs cooler for it than the film seems to think.

Klaus Maria Brandauer plays Baron Bror Blixen with a charm and dissolution that make the failed marriage land. He’s a complicating presence that Streep’s restraint has to deal with. Brandauer earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

David Watkin’s Cinematography

David Watkin’s cinematography captures the Kenyan landscape through wide compositions that let the East African setting feel like a romantic backdrop. Watkin won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The film combines aerial photography with intimate camera work that lets the colonial setting land as a visually rich environment.

The aerial sequences with the biplane run in long takes that let the Kenyan country unfold at full scale, and the camera turns the romance’s sense of freedom into something you can see. I love these sequences most of all, because when that biplane lifts off and Kenya opens out beneath it, the stately pace finally pays off, and I forgive the film every slow scene that came before.

Is Out of Africa worth watching?

An 8. Streep’s performance, Watkin’s Kenya and that biplane flight put it well above the usual prestige costume drama.

It stops at 8 because the stately pacing tests my patience and the romance never burns as hot as the scenery does. Watch it for Streep, for the photography, and for a clear look at how 1980s prestige cinema turned a literary memoir into a Best Picture winner.

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