I read this book once, whose name I cannot remember, that was a biography of Denys Finch Hatton, the aristocratic English big game hunter best known for being the lover of Karen Blixen. Blixen, a Danish woman who married a Swedish baron, had some fame as a writer under various pen names, such as Isak Dinesen for her English readers. Dinesen’s best known work today is her memoir Out of Africa.
However, I’ve never read Out of Africa, but the book I read about Finch Hutton asked a question that at the time struck me as interesting: why are great men only remembered for doing big things? Why can’t someone be great without having a major accomplishment under his or her belt? That’s an interesting question, and the book gave me a good answer: because, at least in the case of Denys Finch Hutton, he turns out to be kinda boring since he never really did anything worth recounting. Blixen and various other side incidents were much more interesting in the book itself, and the only thing I remember about Finch Hutton is he was bald from a young age and self conscious about it, so he was rarely seen without a hat on.
Regardless, in the 1985 movie version, he’s an American with a full head of hair played by Robert Redford.
You know, sitting here in 2019, I am not sure what to make of Sydney Pollack’s movie version of Blixen’s story. It reminds me a bit of Gone with the Wind, and I’m not really a fan of that movie. If anything, Out of Africa is maybe a bit more self-aware as a movie. Maybe. Both feature women in loveless marriages who take up with a dashing man who is something of a rebel in their social circle. The lead actress adopts an accent different from her own while her male lead does not. The relationship doesn’t quite work out as planned, and the whole thing is set in a place of questionable morality, in this case colonized Kenya early in the 20th century.
And therein lies my dilemma. I liked Out of Africa well enough, but it does present European colonizers as, if not in the right, then at least not in the wrong. Karen arrives in Kenya with as much as she can carry of European civilization. That means she brought a lot of luggage including fine china and a cuckoo clock. She opens a school and seems intent on civilizing the natives. To her credit, she also makes sure they people she hires gets medical care and other things they’ll need in the future even after she leaves, but at the same time, she is trying to transplant her culture onto theirs.
Denys, to his credit, calls her out on that. But the first we see of him, he’s come back from an ivory hunt and drops some elephant tusks onto Karen’s train. Likewise, he idealizes the natives too much, treating them like some sort of innocents in the woods types. Neither his nor Karen’s views of the natives is an accurate portrayal of these people.
But, then again, much of the conflict between the two comes because he just won’t settle down. He’s probably just projecting his own feelings onto the locals or something. There’s some sort of borderline libertarian streak to Redford’s Denys. Anything that could hold him back, even marriage to Karen, is some kind of restriction to his freedom. No wonder he takes up flying.
As a romance and a character study of a couple who find and lose love, Out of Africa works very well. I just couldn’t get past all those Europeans walking around Africa like they owned the place.
Grade: B
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