John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#12 — Karen Blixen, aristocratic Danish author who owns a coffee plantation in Kenya during the first decades of the twentieth century.
JOHN: Did Karen Blixen once have a farm in Africa? Like a marching zombie with arms outstretched, Karen intones this mantra via voiceover several times during Out of Africa, either because she remains in disbelief at her accomplishment or feels compelled to remind the viewer of a reason to focus on Ms. Blixen amid Sydney Pollack’s African travelogue.
Out of Africa tells the tale of Karen Blixen, a headstrong woman who relocates from Denmark to Kenya circa 1914 to marry her lover’s twin brother (Klaus Maria Brandauer), run a short-lived coffee plantation, and eventually fall in love with English game-hunter Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford). Out of Africa was a project that piqued but ultimately eluded such directors as Orson Welles, David Lean, and Nicholas Roeg. As envisioned by Sydney Pollack and distributed by Universal Pictures in 1985, it's a colossal Hollywood production that endlessly reveres the natural beauty of its Kenyan environs while dodging engagement with the colonialist specificities of its time and place...
Similar to Merchant-Ivory’s more artistically successful A Room With a View (released just five months later in the US), Out of Africa harnesses the vitality and “unruliness” of a foreign country to shake the stuffy spirits of its mannered, upper-crust protagonists.
Unlike the aforementioned film, Out of Africa is a self-important tribute to its own production, a picturesque fairy tale that lacks both bite and heat.
And from this corner of the globe, we bring you another accented, downcast, yet indefatigable Meryl Streep performance. Karen Blixen was a part the actress lobbied heavily for, reportedly wearing a low-cut blouse and push-up bra for her first meeting with Pollack, who had at first thought Streep too patrician for the role. Karen herself will transform from rigid European to a more relaxed romantic in the steamy tents of the African jungle, trysting with her gorgeous paramour Robert Redford in secret after her husband Baron Blixen joins the British army during the first World War. Still, nothing as nearly revealing as Streep’s audition outfit finds its way into a movie that is too prudish and gargantuan to inspire any real sensual pleasures. On my second viewing, I had hoped that Streep’s performance would leave more of an impression than it had on my first, bogged down as she is by Pollack’s preference for sweeping vistas and bombastic music over deep concentration on the lives of his characters. Although she is a professed storyteller, this feels less like Karen’s story that she herself is retelling and more like an eyewitness report of her time in Africa.
Locked into a self-serious demeanor, Streep’s Karen is a stranger in a strange land who must bravely flout convention all while maintaining a poised, aristocratic dignity, pushing emotion behind her face like a dam. The film seems decisively split into a first act of trying circumstances and a second of ill-fated romance, and Streep settles into the role as Karen’s genteel behavior is stirred by indignation and passion, relaxing into a project that rarely tests her abilities but instead showcases her knack for cerebral emoting and weighing competing desires.
This is your first go-around with Karen Blixen, right? Did Streep offer a new side of her talent in Out of Africa, or is she simply coasting through a fine role while on vacation with Robert Redford?
MATTHEW: This is indeed my first occasion meeting the Baroness Blixen in Out of Africa, which I was expecting to be little more than an imperialist bodice-ripper starring Redford, the unaging golden god, and Streep, cast here as her first — but not last — abandoned farm wife who is lustily led astray.
Pollack’s film is often the white-lensed, paint-by-numbers travelogue that you’ve sufficiently described above. As Karen escapes Denmark and rushes into a half-hearted marriage with Brandauer’s Bror in the opening scenes, Streep, clad in the first of many sumptuous and impeccably-tailored costumes by the queenly Milena Canonero, once again seems trapped in a broad, plot-driven script that requires a concept of a woman more than an actual woman of body and mind, a tricky acting task that, as we’ve seen in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Still of the Night, and the same year’s Plenty, is not one at which Streep easily excels. Pollack, an impulsive and often uneven director of actors, hardly seems like the right collaborator to help Streep transcend such abstraction without resorting to the type of impossibly mannered period persona that occasionally peeks through Streep’s work. And the broad Danish accent, by turns clipped and capacious, does the performance no favors.
So much of Streep’s assignment in Out of Africa seems set up for the actress to simply coast, as you’ve suggested, or else flat-out stumble. By my estimation, Streep does neither. There isn’t a single, decisive moment in the performance at which character and actress suddenly, magically click, setting aside all reservations and paving the way for a bravura interpretation. Instead, Streep just relaxes — into the character, into the accent, and ultimately into the film. Karen Blixen isn’t, by any means, one of Streep’s fuller creations, although there is nary a scene in Out of Africa that does not highlight the character nor explicitly pitch itself from her perspective within the entire nearly three hour runtime. Hold up Karen Blixen next to Karen Silkwood, Sophie Zawistowska, Joanna Kramer, or even The Deer Hunter’s indelibly tremulous Linda and the character and performance shrink to near-microscopic proportions. But Streep, yet again, succeeds in providing a vivid sense of what it feels like to be this particular person, here and now, putting forth an opinionated, uncompromising woman of will where I had anticipated a gauzily distressed damsel or a dewy romantic heroine. Streep does this not by barreling through the role with all the virtuosic technique that, by 1985, was evident to anyone who had gone to the movies at all within the past decade, but through far subtler means that are utterly specific to the character that exists on the page, even though Streep’s Karen often looks to be entertaining far more options than screenwriter Kurt Luedtke has readily envisioned.
Even when heartbroken, Karen is not immune to a wry remark or a warm gesture, which is perhaps why Streep avoids sticking to any one mood or emotional state for too long, oscillating between distress, uncertainty, pleasure, envy, and arousal, all in the film’s first few passages, before Redford himself has fully emerged from the periphery as a potential suitor. In doing so, she evokes a multifaceted personality in an often depersonalized genre, refusing to play the aristocratic outsider who is embarrassingly out of her element.
This is a considerable feat, which isn’t to say it’s a revelatory or particularly novel one; Streep is definitely guilty of falling into some blank projections of wonder or repeating a couple of stern, strong-chinned, eyebrow-raising looks of disapproval, directly borrowed from her lengthy catalogue of stock expressions. The details of Streep’s work in Out of Africa that impressed me most don’t reveal anything new about her recognizably well-honed abilities, but are rather talents that have always been clear to the naked eye, yet perhaps never garnered the recognition they deserve. Streep has always used her hands to mesmerizing ends; in Sophie’s Choice, the mere act of touching her face felt like the instinctual raising of a barrier between our eyes and the radical emotional clarity of her facial features. In Out of Africa, there’s an intriguing tactile quality to Streep’s performance, whether she’s tenderly caressing the pen that Denys gifts her along her face or sinking her hands into the dirt to plant coffee beans or, late in the film, shakily taking a puff of a cigarette upon receiving an especially tragic piece of bad news. I wish Pollack had foregrounded more of these gestures, but the moments that are included serve as meaningful contributions to our intimate immersion, via Streep, into Karen’s journey. There’s a lot else I admire about Streep’s performance here without quite loving it, but I’m curious about what you think her characterization is missing?
JOHN: While we’re on the subject of Meryl’s Hands, I’d be remiss not to highlight that agonizing funeral scene, an undisputable peak of the performance where Streep signals that Karen is unable to confront the open secret of her affair. Is Karen walking away from the grave with dirt-in-hand a sign of her refusal to make the affair public, or is it her inability to face the immense heartache of her departed paramour? Or is it both? Has she admitted to herself that she’s not, in fact, the unspoilt Danish aristocrat that arrived to Kenya years ago, and can she show such a transformation to this group of mourners? Either way, Karen’s ambiguity in this moment colors a scene that could easily cast her as a humiliated widow and require copious tears on a hillside grave plot.
In an often unsubtle and bloated film, perhaps it is harder to value the subtlety and intuition of Streep’s performance while watching Out of Africa? Atop her lover’s grave, getting her hair shampooed, leading a caravan to a war zone, negotiating with a lion, Streep is wondrously alive in ways that command your attention and remind you of her prodigious gifts for uninhibited feeling.
“How I wish I could run my own show like you do,” Suzanna Hamilton’s tomboyish Felicity admits to Streep’s Karen, who quips, “Is that what I do?” By foregrounding the feminist qualities of Karen, Streep again creates a portrait of a woman caught between the tug of social convention and her own desires to challenge them. In her ace Film Comment write up of Streep’s career for her 2008 Chaplin Award, Molly Haskell singles out Karen Blixen as a Streep performance that wrestles with gender in relation to Streep’s character and her own persona:
Both bossy and insecure, she strikes me as perfectly capturing a certain well-born type of European woman, a mix of enlightened liberalism and prudishness; patronizing noblesse oblige and vulnerability. Early on, left behind by husband Klaus-Maria Brandauer, she makes it clear that she yearns for the man’s life of action, envying them the ability “go off to be tested” whereas a woman’s test is “how well we can endure loneliness.” It turns out she’s better at passing men’s tests than women’s, as she rides off into the bush where a dangerous battle is underway. That’s her bravery and her foolishness. She wants to be independent but appreciated, wants the English community “to like me but I want to be left alone, too.” The paradox of the movie star. … It’s to Streep’s credit that she makes us feel for this desperately rational woman who’s afraid of feeling, and who finally can’t live up to her own resolutions…
Haskell’s estimation of Streep here perfectly distills the contradictory threads of Karen Blixen while drawing parallels between role and star that aren’t exactly apparent in the moment but make perfect sense when you consider them.
But is Out of Africa really the feminist film it is sometimes credited as? Denys and Karen cannot reconcile their conceptions of freedom, love, and marriage, and ultimately split before he dies in a plane crash. Rather than place Karen and Denys on equal footing in a pivotal break-up scene, the film casts Karen as a prim and childish woman whose attempts to put a ring on her lover are met with humiliation and foolishness. Remarking on this concession, Karina Longworth notes how, “it plays as though Karen is punished for trying to contain a butterfly in a bottle, for wrecking the male fantasy that there could be no such thing as a liberated woman who supports herself financially and submits to sex without strings, on her partner’s terms, without ever asserting what she really wants.” Karen runs her own show, but the show also runs her, and Pollack’s confused conception of gender and marriage ultimately stymie the bold impulses within both Streep and Redford’s performances.
Streep thought it would flop, but Out of Africa was the fifth highest-grossing film of 1985 (and, adjusted for inflation, her second-highest grossing domestic hit behind Kramer vs Kramer) and became her third Best Picture winner (no small feat), the only one of which centralizes her. In hindsight, it marks a legendary apex of her career and also the high-point that begets an inevitable slope. Glancing over her subsequent filmography, Out of Africa seems like one of the last instances of Streep achieving this confluence of box office, critical, and AMPAS success in a role worthy of her talent.
But we’re living (and watching) in the now. Are we closing a chapter or beginning one? And what will you remember about Baroness Blixen?
Out of Africa was a smash hit, inspiring fashion editorials, selling heaps of soundtracks and ticketsMATTHEW: I’m not sure if Out of Africa can be properly gauged as either a commencement or a capstone for a certain infallible period in Streep’s career, which wouldn’t wane outright until the early 1990s. While appreciated at the time and well-remembered now, Streep’s performance — or, specifically, its vocal quality — wasn’t met without some skepticism. Clips of the film highlighting Streep’s accent work were played on Danish television, prompting viewers to phone in and poke fun at its alleged inaccuracy. Geraldine Page, that year’s eventual and long-overdue Best Actress winner for The Trip to Bountiful, lightly mocked Streep in a People Magazine profile, in which she remarked, “People are beginning to wonder if she can talk normal.” It should also be said that, in retrospect, Streep’s Karen Blixen is perhaps not the sort of barnstorming acting achievement that demands the Academy’s recognition, especially with the utterly stupendous Mia Farrow, Cher, Carmen Maura, and Norma Aleandro all waiting in the wings that year, not to mention The Color Purple’s singularly extraordinary Whoopi Goldberg and Sweet Dreams’ volcanic Jessica Lange sitting alongside Streep as fellow bridesmaids.
Yet taken on its own terms, there is a lot to appreciate and even applaud about this performance, which remains better-judged and more sharply specific than just about any other component of the film, which Streep single-handedly elevates at nearly every moment by considering aspects of her character that, frankly, didn’t require any intense examination in order for this behemoth of a movie to pull off its intended, tear-jerking effect. Brandauer (also Oscar-nominated) is still best in show, drolly enlivening a wily, trifling, and perpetually absent husband who is appropriately infuriating and yet strangely endearing. He brings out some of the spikiest reactions of Streep’s career thus far, but would his deft performance have been at all possible without the abiding affection — and competitively carnal attraction — that Streep nurses for her co-star, even in the face of personal slights that couldn’t possibly be more humiliating for Karen? This lusty, self-sabotaging instinct of the character feels sufficiently and thoughtfully explored by Streep, whose equal if not identical chemistry with Redford and Brandauer prevents this quasi-love triangle from feeling overwhelmingly weighted in one direction and provides Karen with a palpable sense of something lost (i.e. a marriage) just as she stands to gain a great deal (i.e. the love of a lifetime).
Best of all, though, is that Streep largely refuses to take either herself or Karen so deathly seriously, knowing full well that a cinematic saga like Out of Africa would have sunk under the weight of any solemn self-importance on the part of its actors. She remains a game and good-humored presence throughout, letting herself look haggard on her impetuous horseback trek through the battlegrounds to reunite with her husband or giving Redford a dry double-take when he kiddingly tells her he learned to fly yesterday, right as she’s climbing into the back of his jet. Streeps appears genuinely enlivened by Karen’s call to adventure, but she also knows when not to impose a surplus of personality, as in the expedition sequences that allow us to live vicariously as Karen, a newfound, keen-eyed, and quietly inquisitive explorer. It should also be noted that the bulk of Karen’s interactions with her African help are scripted like that excruciatingly earnest scene near the end of Boyhood, when the Latino laborer-turned-waiter thanks Patricia Arquette for suggesting he go to college all those years ago. Streep, at least, has the good judgment to underplay the bulk of these exchanges with a professional reserve that unsentimentally dispels the false illusions about the bond between colonizer and colonized that Pollack and company would have you believe.
And then there’s Redford, who elicits real heat and romance from Streep within this inspired cinematic pairing of the unruffled matinee idol and the cerebrally-inclined thespian. Their couplehood has the authentic pain of unresolved love, especially in the chapters when Denys refuses to abide by Karen’s conservative core and her need for constant companionship, a personal principle that Streep’s lucid, unyielding rationalizing makes both duly exasperating and unusually poignant. She seeks neither pity nor compromise, which preserves Karen’s headstrong nature right at the arrival of romantic bliss, a narrative juncture when most leading ladies are required to do nothing more than make goo-goo eyes. But mostly I just love watching Streep watch Redford and all the ways this fondness physically manifests itself, free of fuss or frills, as in the subtle flush of beaming, breathtaking relief that passes through Karen upon Denys’ late-film reappearance in her now-empty estate. Out of Africa is rarely galvanizing filmmaking, but Streep is nothing less than a fetching center of credible, closely-felt heartache throughout it. Pollack’s natural vistas and extravagant set-pieces have already receded into the back of my mind, but I have yet to forget the way Streep simply looks at Redford, gazing at him with an interconnected intimacy that keeps this sweeping epic on a human scale.
Your turn, reader! What are your memories of Karen’s African farm? Is this Meryl landmark just a commercial zenith or a top-ranking feat of acting too?