Where the Wild Things Were Out of Africa

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

He appears first as a silhouette on the African horizon, the dying sun behind him, the very emblem of romantic heroism, standing easy in a lost world. She appears at first in dream-tossed sleep, reinventing him and reimagining the landscape that shaped their love in ways that are perhaps immeasurable.

He is Denys Finch Hatton, aristocrat, aviator and athlete, war hero and white hunter. She is, when we meet her, Isak Dinesen, storyteller. But before that she was Baroness Karen Blixen, who in 1913-14 exchanged family money for a title, a farm in Kenya and the 17 years of experience that, distilled to its essence, would form the basis for one of this century's truly singular literary compositions, Out of Africa.

As Dinesen's eloquent biographer, Judith Thurman, puts it, Finch Hatton "was so precious that he is mentioned sparingly" in the book. He is there as a man who comes and goes at the wayward bidding of his own enigmatic spirit. But at least he is present. Dinesen's husband Bror Blixen, the amiable decadent who brought the writer to her great subject, is never mentioned at all. With his debts and his womanizing and, ultimately, his syphilis, he is too coarse for the rarefied atmosphere she created.

It always seemed, indeed, that her work, so dependent for its haunting power on the tonalities of her prose, at once intensely specific and mysteriously reticent, was too fine for the narrative demands of the screen. Out of Africa is a memoir and a collection of tales. But it is also an anthropologist's notebook, a naturalist's diary and a mystic's ruminations. And, yes, a duplicitous fiction in which time is compressed and rearranged, incidents conflated. The narrator granted herself a serene distance and freedom from quotidian concerns. How do you get all that into a movie and fulfill an audience's expectations for the form?

The answer turns out to be simple: Make bold with the material, taking care only to retain its important truth, which is an emotional one. This has been accomplished in two ways. The film's viewpoint is not the writer's, who in effect saw her subject from the air. The camera is firmly on the ground, looking for close-ups. The movie's manner is not the author's either. It is concerned with restoring what she left out: factual (as opposed to spiritual) biography of a conventional kind, drawn from Thurman's book, a study of Finch Hatton's life and Dinesen's letters, which are altogether more open than her book. Where the documents fail him, Screenwriter Luedtke improvises plausible fictions to fill the dramatic gaps. In the process he provides Director Pollack and his actors with still other elements that Dinesen ignored, a coherent overall story line and well-shaped scenes that are mostly playable in crisply minimal dialogue.

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.