Out of Africa

Despite its title, the white people in Out of Africa are not desperately fleeing the continent. They love it. They stay there a while. Some of them leave and even come back. "This is not the war-torn continent I imagined Africa always is and will be," you say. You're right, because it's set in the 1910s, before European "civilization" wrought havoc on hundreds of millions of people.

Karen Blixen, played by Meryl Streep (about the only person who didn't win an Oscar for this movie), leaves Denmark to live in British Kenya with her new husband, Baron Blixen. If you love crusty British aristocracy, this picture is for you! Despite the urbane Brits running around oppressing natives, Blixen loves Africa. "I had a farm, in Africa," she narrates constantly. She runs the coffee farm, mostly by herself. And wouldn't you know it, she runs into people who don't think a woman can run a farm.

Luckily for Karen, the Brits are too busy destroying the lives of the locals to care about keeping down Europeans. The time period probably represents the last time Africa was Africa, with tribes and proto-kings running around and without all those messy things like borders and nation-states, and the rape of natural resources and...whew, this wears me out. Most of this stuff takes place off-screen, sparingly rearing its head in the narrative.

Blixen asks a bureaucrat for some money to help repair the damage to her farm. He scoffs when he learns that she isn't using all her land for crops, instead keeping a local tribe on its ancestral lands. "Why don't you move them off?" he asks. "Because they live there," she says. Silly Danes, never disrupting thousands of years of local traditions to more productively export goods.

But save the social discussions for after the credits roll. Get lost in Africa. It's easy. If you enjoyed Planet Earth and its sweeping shots of the African landscape, get ready to be nostalgic. This movie's full of 'em. If you enjoy getting lost in Robert Redford's eyes and cool reassurance about the world, you'll love it. I did. It pleased me so much that I didn't even loathe Meryl Streep. From me, that's a compliment.