Cinema: Where the Wild Things Were Out of Africa

Directed by Sydney Pollack Screenplay by Kurt Luedtke

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This scheme requires Finch Hatton, in whom Robert Redford has found a soul mate, to stand in for the spirit of Africa. Laconic, ironic, elusive and, in his silky way, brutal, he continually offers his lover spectacular glimpses of a great nature. Then, just when she thinks she has grasped him, he slips away into the clouds. Meryl Streep, as Dinesen, is his perfect match. Always at her best when challenged to leave her own time and place for regions more passionate and generous, Streep embodies an aristocrat's arrogance toward the unknown and an artist's vulnerability to it. They play against each other warily and discreetly, often content to let their silences, and the flow of the movie itself, speak for them.

What the entire cast (including a slyly insinuating Klaus Maria Brandauer as Bror) helps to realize, what Pollack has captured in simple, forceful imagery and in the perfect pace of his editing, is something one dared not hope to find in this movie. It is Dinesen's remarkable rhythm. She never held a note too long. Africa had sung too many songs to her in a voice she knew was beginning to die. She had to get down on paper as many of them as she could, and do it without losing the haunting beat that had carried these sounds to her ear.

She transformed them, finally, into a melody of loss, something terrible and sad. The financial failure of her farm and the death of Finch Hatton at about the same time drove her back to Europe. But like the "civilizing" of Africa, personal setbacks symbolized to her a much larger loss, that of romantic idealism in the modern world. Her consolation was that in this defeat, some men like Finch Hatton, some women like herself, were given a last opportunity to display a noble quality she also fancied was fast disappearing: gallantry in the face of crushing odds.

Now across a vast span of time and distance, a movie director, working artfully in his own medium, has answered her spirit and amplified it. Would that have surprised Dinesen? Very likely. But it should not surprise anyone who has watched Pollack's career develop. Straightforward and self-effacing stylistically, he has touched films as diverse as a transvestite farce (Tootsie) and a contemplation of journalistic ethics (Absence of Malice) with his own romantic idealism. Now he has allowed it to overflow the boundaries of his admirable professionalism. This is, in today's cultural climate, an unspeakably gallant act, but also one that may be richly rewarded. Out of Africa is, at last, the free-spirited, fullhearted gesture that everyone has been waiting for the movies to make all decade long. It reclaims the emotional territory that is rightfully theirs.

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