Out of Africa

In my review of Driving Miss Daisy, I said I could've turned in a one-word review -- "safe" -- and it would've explained everything. Little did I know that the next Best Picture winner I'd watch would make Driving Miss Daisy feel as edgy as Kids. Except "safe" isn't enough for Out Of Africa, because at least Driving Miss Daisy got within eyeshot of topics and themes. Out Of Africa has no such ambitions, largely because it has little to no ambition whatsoever. The best way to describe this movie is an unorthodox comparison; it reminds me of those old cartoons (think Bugs Bunny or Donald Duck) where a large snake would swallow up a character, but you could still see the precise outline of that character inside the snake. Out Of Africa is a romantic melodrama that swallowed the Africa Plains episode of Planet Earth. All of this movie's issues can be traced back to two issues: pacing and Robert Redford's character. Let's start with the pacing issue. A long movie isn't necessarily a bad thing; RRR, The Godfather, Avengers Endgame, they all have positively gargantuan run times and yet manage to both keep a pace appropriate to the movie, and one that will keep the viewer entertained. Out Of Africa does not have enough content for two hours and forty minutes of movie. I'd venture it barely has enough for a hundred minutes. The erosion that created the Grand Canyon moves faster than this movie. You could watch dust settle on a flat surface and get more action than this movie. It is shockingly, almost defiantly, inert. That's bad enough on its own, but then the run time makes it that much more unbearable. And on top of THAT, the movie is painstakingly exhaustive in documenting every single, solitary detail of Baroness Karen Blixen's life, over many, many years. To put it in perspective, this movie starts before World War I and ends over a decade after the war's conclusion. The war lasted six years. And the war ends at about the halfway point of this movie. I know exposition dumps are a bad screenwriting trope, but I would've done unspeakable things, things that would've gotten me arrested or deported, for this to exposition dump her backstory and just get to the damned romance, because so much of said backstory feels like fluff. Except that the romantic aspect of this movie doesn't work because of Robert Redford's character, Denys. None of what I'm about to say is Redford's fault. He (and Meryl Streep) are doing the kind of heavy lifting only Greek Titans are condemned to do. But Redford can't save how Denys is written. Every shred of his dialogue is supposed to come off as this profound, erudite, philosophical musing from the world's last free spirit, a key to unlock the cage around the stuffy Baroness' heart. In reality, it comes off as the musings of a pompous, aloof, and selfish windbag, barfing up platitudes that would be rejected from fortune cookies. Denys doesn't feel like a free spirit; in fact, he's the one who feels imprisoned, but in a emotional prison of his own design, afraid to embrace anything whole-heartedly. If he were alive today, he'd be the kind of person who would suffer one break-up and become a serial dater because he has "trust issues", but would spend every waking moment complaining about how lonely he is. I saw no reason whatsoever why this woman should pine for this insensitive clod over the course of a decade and a half. He comes in and out of her life with the regularity of a migratory bird, stopping in for a night or two to get a piece, and then splits. If it weren't for his insistence that he loves her (which, given how he treats her, has to asterisked with "in his own way"), any sane person would call this a booty-call arrangement. Romantic! Look, the cinematography is great (although how hard can it be to make the African savannah look great on film), and Redford and Streep are giving it all they got. But there is so little to this movie, and so much of this movie, they can't make up for its failings of inflated scale and poor writing. This is a soft, flabby, anodyne romance epic that has no business being counted among the very best movies cinema has produced. Had this not won an Oscar, it would disappear into the bottomless swamp of forgotten movies. Cinema is full of beautiful love stories with passion and romance and longing. You can do a lot better than watching a woman take over two hours to realize she's a side-piece. And if you want to see the beautiful cinematography capturing the African landscape and wildlife, that's what National Geographic is for.