Adapted from the memoir Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, the book Silence Will Speak by Errol Trzebinski, and the book Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller by Judith Thurman
A Danish woman moves to Kenya to marry a Swedish baron and start a coffee farm. In her many years living there, she falls in love with the country and an Englishman, but ultimately loses them both.
Much to my surprise, I didn't find this movie quite as tedious this time as when I first watched it for my Best Picture blog. It didn't drag quite as much as I remembered. However, I must say that it is one of the worst adaptations to win this award, at least in terms of consistency with the source material. In Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen/whatever you want to call her (she went by about six different names) mostly relates anecdotes from her time on the farm, only a couple of which make it into the film. She barely mentions her husband, and while Denys Finch Hatton features fairly prominently, he's far from the main focus of the book. The movie, on the other hand, is almost entirely about her love life, and much of it isn't even accurate, to the point that I feel is almost insulting, both to her memory and to her book.
I get that the movie included her getting syphilis from her husband, even though she did not mention that in her memoir, because that had a very big impact on her life, and was included in both of the other books. But she seemed more bitter toward her husband in the movie than the books described, and most people didn't know about the nature of her illness until after her death, so in the movie when she tells Denys she had syphilis and he responds with "I know," it's kind of weird that she doesn't even question how he could possibly know that. Overall the movie spent way too much time focused on her marriage and love life in general. Her husband, Bror, also seemed a lot nastier on screen than in any of the books. And almost every detail of her relationship with her lover Denys Finch Hatton - how they met, how their relationship developed, conversations they had, even how she found out about his death - is different from how it actually happened. Possibly the thing that bothered me most about the movie was Denys calling her Karen. Pretty much nobody ever called her Karen, although that was her given name, and Denys always called her Tania. One of the biographies mentioned that it was only people who tried to pretend they knew her better than they did who referred to her as Karen, so it was kind of hard not to interpret this as a sign that the screenwriter was trying to pretend he knew enough to tell her story without actually having bothered to read it.
I know I'm probably coming across as unnecessarily harsh, but after having slogged through three rather long books about these people, I feel like I know them quite well, and this movie seems like an insult to their memory. And that goes for the Africans as well as the Europeans. Reading Out of Africa from a modern perspective, it definitely has some problematic elements, coming as it does from a colonial mindset, but Dinesen clearly cared about and respected the native African people she came in contact with, even if they were mostly her servants or subordinates on the farm built on land that was stolen from them. I can see why a movie made nearly 50 years later would find it difficult to portray some of her stories without seeming racist, but the decision to eliminate or greatly reduce the role of almost all of the African characters in order to expand a European love triangle isn't much better. And then, adding insult to injury, they couldn't even do justice to any of those three white people. Despite all this, the movie does have a few things to recommend it, and I don't hate it, but I'm almost completely certain that Isak Dinesen would have.
I cannot even begin to express how relieved I am to finally be done with this story. Next up is Room with a View, thankfully based on only one relatively short novel by E. M. Forster. So it should be significantly less than two and a half months until my next post.
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