Ex Hollywood semper aliquid crap

Having read the book, I'd long wondered about the movie Out of Africa.  After all, Karen Blixen's memoir is overly-detailed about her relationships with her servants and maddeningly evasive about the topics that fascinate: her marriage, her love affair with Denys Finch-Hatton, and syphilis.  How could the non-chronological, evocative but not-plot-driven memoir be migrated to the screen?

Having just seen the movie, I can now answer that question: it wasn't.  Whether it could have been is an open question, but plainly Sydney Pollack & Co. did such violence to the book in transplanting Karen Blixen's story to the screen that - in a just world - the two would not share the same title.

Admitting at the outset that the memoir cannot be transposed to the Hollywood movie context without severe alteration, such alteration as was necessary must nonetheless aim to preserve the mysterious, elusive and attractive character of the memoir that remains its abiding power.  Instead, the movie systematically mangled that fragile essence. 

The movie's dialogue is the equivalent of taking a club to Blixen's authorial voice.  Bad in its own right - the dialogue in the movie caused me suffering - it was outright irresponsible as a representation of conversations that could have occurred between Blixen and others in Kenya in 1914.  As a historical matter, Karen and Bror most likely didn't openly discuss their shared syphilis or his philandering.  As a personal matter, straightforward expression like, "I want you to take a place in town" (after Bror seduces another woman) or "I like the way you're honest with me" (after Bror admits that he's dumping all the farm work on her), are absolutely contrary to Blixen's approach to conflict resolution, both in life and in her storytelling. 

But the dialogue is problematic, not because "it didn't happen that way," but because it misleads the audience about the way Karen Blixen related to the people around her and, in the process, kills the very quality of Karen Blixen's story that makes it worth telling.  In her relational approach to others, Meryl Streep's Blixen is a liberated, modern woman; in reality, Karen Blixen was not.  She was an atavistic romantic who idolized the aristocratic values of a century earlier - and she suffered for it, however much her wounds were self-inflicted.  The allure of Karen Blixen's storytelling is the way she refracts her realities through the distortion lens of her aristocratic ideals - and it's precisely that rich and strange distortion that the movie denies its audience.

Karen Blixen was - and is - the stuff of legends, so much so that she managed to preserve herself and Denys Finch-Hatton in a shroud of myth that has endured for seventy-five years and shows little sign of abating.  For this reason, she's a natural for the movie treatment.  That the movie had to refract her reality through the industrial distortion lens of Hollywood sadly diminishes Blixen's bizarre and enchanting legacy.

(Image courtesy of Britannica)