List Price:   $9.95 Price:   $6.49 find out more information

Buy posters from this movie

In both movies, Redford plays a handsome adventurer, who can't be pinned down by the woman who loves him. She fights and screams to get him to settle down with her, but refuses to bend at all herself, standing true to her goals and principles, despite the trouble they cause. They fall in love with him after an early, emotional meeting, and end the movie alone, after he has departed, saddened but proud, and defiant as ever.

In both movies, Pollack wavers, meanders and loses his way a bit. Sub-themes enter - McCarthyism, Colonialism - but they're just backdrops to the romance, which takes over the film. Both films end on a tear jerking emotional note, pining for the love that might have been.

Difference: OUT OF AFRICA is remembered for it's scenery, music, that wonderful flying scene, its Oscars. It's missing one thing: the incomparable Barbra Streisand.

Admittedly, Streep has less to work with, as Karen Blixen, a bland Scandinavian who wrote poems about lions. OUT OF AFRICA's Blixen goes to Africa to spite her shitty boyfriend, and ends up making the best out of what she finds there: a coffee plantation, and an empty marriage. As in MUSIC OF THE HEART, A CRY IN THE DARK, SILKWOOD et. al., Streep's character is a decent woman rising to the occasion when wolves are at the door.

Streisand, on the other hand, plays passionate powder-kegs, women seething with personality and emotion from day one. A Streisand character wouldn't notice the wolves at the door: her own inner conflict is too compelling.

A Streep character breaks down in the witness box; a Streisand character cries over breakfast. THE WAY WE WERE is the perfect artefact from Streisand's early career: a non-musical role (she nevertheless sings the famous theme song, an extra-diegetic nod to her multi-media fame) that balances her dazzling theatrical charisma with her ultra-brainy pessimism.

Streisand, as Katie, wants love - real love, which she feels she has found in Redford. Sweethearts from college, their adult lives have crossed and fused. But she also wants her own space, and the right to live a part of her life in flagrant defiance of romantic law. She cannot understand why she cannot have her heart in one hand, and her brain in the other, and becomes increasingly frustrated that she cannot reason her way out of arguments with Redford's character, Hubble.

When he comes to her place of work - a radio station - to tell her it's all off, Streisand emerges, from a sound booth, and steps into the room. "I get it," she screams at him, "I get it! Go on - get out!" Note that she doesn't refer to feeling anything. Katie may be heartbroken, but she sure as hell ain't dumb. What her heart can't fathom, her brain can. Nevermind the fabulous sight of Streisand stepping into the spotlight to deliver this amazing non-musical showstopper, proving that whether or not she's singing, her command of vocal rhythms and stage placing is simply without peer.

Katie, like Streisand, refuses to let her heart have its way entirely. It wants love, but it has to have it on her will's terms. At no point does Streisand play Katie as a pre-feminist, insisting that her rights be respected, lest she be forced to supplicate herself to a male. Katie wants to supplicate herself to Hubble, she just also wants to be politically vocal and career-minded.

The mistake of the film is to paint Katie tragic. In the end, I think Katie realises that Hubble is in fact a couple of rungs beneath her. Whatever love she feels for him, they're fundamentally incompatible. He is simply not versatile enough to embrace her contradictions, and not sure enough in his own. He resents the differences between him and Katie because he can't come up with a good enough reason why he should disagree with her. He doesn't offer any worthwhile alternative - he just wants to keep things light. At one point, he tells her that she pushes too hard, that she doesn't just give in. But that's what he does - roll through life on luck and happiness. She's a darker personality, more analytical, cynical, and in need of guarantees. He wants her to be a puppy dog like him, and she simply isn't.

At film's end, then, it's Katie triumphant. Her hair re-frizzed, a bundle of counter-culture pamphlets in her hand, she's sailing her own boat, as she always has. She's sorry to not have Hubble on board, and probably a little lonely, too. But bad luck, she's got other things to do. Hubble is unchanged, jumping in and out of limos with generic, younger blonds.

To me, Hubble's the one that ends up lonely. Stuck with partners that are not his equals, yet not complete within himself. For Katie, love is a Divine bonus, she needs it no less than she needs her own respect, but no more either.

At the end of OUT OF AFRICA, Streep's Blixen leaves that continent (hence the title, I suppose) to start anew. But start a new what? A coffee shop in Copenhagen? In fact, she spends a great deal of time reminiscing, writing lyrically about her time in Africa, often concentrating on her affair with Dennis. We don't see fictional Katie again, she lives only in THE WAY WE WERE. But I can't imagine her drifting, broken, trying to make a new life out of reporting on the old. Unlike Blixen, Katie/Streisand sees her life as an ever-unfolding story. She is so strongly self-defined, self-reliant and unique, that she absorbs all experiences.

If Streisand's current marriage ever ends, it's impossible to imagine her drifting off to an attic somewhere to write a melancholy autobiography. She may be heartbroken, but, like Katie, she'll be in the studio the next day, picking up where she was before the romance, and moving right along.

 del.icio.us    
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=5852&reviewer=305
originally posted: 04/14/02 16:11:34
 printer-friendly format