Out of Africa
1985
Director: Sydney Pollack
Starring: Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Klaus Maria Brandauer
I have to once again reiterate my detestation of epics. They are just not what I want when I watch a movie. I like small stories. Epics are never small – it’s the definition of “epic.”
I was kind of dreading watching Out of Africa, given that I knew it was a romance, had grand vista shots of Africa, and was 2 hours and 41 minutes long. In short, all the classic ingredients of a long, tedious waste of my time.
Unfortunately, the movie did not prove me wrong.
Karen (Streep) proposes a marriage of convenience with a friend of hers, Bror (Brandauer). He accepts and they move to Africa, where he promptly starts treating theirs as a marriage of convenience. She gets inconceivably huffy about this, and decides to “take pity” on the natives working their coffee plantation by throwing herself into their lives and the plantation itself. World War I happens, other stuff happens, she meets Denys (Redford), other boring stuff happens, she meets Denys again, other random stuff happens, she falls in love with Denys, and then, y’know, epics end how all epics end. Two hours and forty one minutes later, I breathe a sigh of relief and hit eject on the DVD player. Yes, that’s part of the plot.
