Sydney Pollack (1985)
During her lecture introducing the Katharine Hepburn season at BFI early this year, Hannah McGill briefly compared Hepburn and Meryl Streep. McGill contrasted the permanency of Hepburn’s screen persona with Streep’s absorption of herself into a character – ‘that whole immersive thing’. You could hear the irritation in McGill’s voice as she spoke those words. Streep is famously supposed to disappear into each role that she plays but she obviously doesn’t; if she did, Hannah McGill wouldn’t be so aware of (and annoyed by) watching Meryl Streep. It’s odd that this ‘whole immersive thing’ has proved such an enduring critical myth. It was exploded decades ago by Dave Kehr, who gave Streep a consistently bad press back in the 1980s (and perhaps beyond: I haven’t read his later reviews). Kehr wrote of A Cry in the Dark in 1988:
‘[It] has been conceived as a director’s film – a movie that works through imagery and narrative rhythm, through visual and aural resonance. But when Streep enters a movie (and it isn’t something she can help by now) it immediately becomes an actor’s film, a movie about performance – her accent, her gestures, her walk. Meryl Streep upstages Ayers Rock.’
The Vanity Fair piece in the programme note for this month’s BFI screening of Out of Africa refers to Streep, in her interpretation of Karen Blixen, as ‘submersing herself in character and Danish accent’. Submersion makes a slight change from immersion but Meryl Streep, in an auteurist context, is less submersive than subversive. She got on the nerves of at least one notoriously non-auteurist critic too but how irksome Streep’s longevity in cinema must be to those for whom a film should always be ‘a director’s film’. A performer as outstanding as she is (in all senses of the word) will be problematic even for film students interested in ‘the actor as auteur’, a theme of Amy Lawrence’s 2010 study The Passion of Montgomery Clift. Lawrence’s idea of Clift as the auteur of his movies depends, however, on his not transforming himself into different people. It depends not just on the consistency of his screen persona but on the connection between this and his off-screen persona. (The latter is, of course, something of which modern-day viewers are more aware than were audiences who saw Clift’s films on their original release.) Meryl Streep is a very strong but very different screen presence. We don’t think of her as a particular type or as a collection of particular human qualities; still less do we think, as we watch her, about what she might do in her private life. Dave Kehr and I have very different views of her – I’m pro, he’s con. But I think he’s essentially right about the Streep effect that he describes. Whenever Meryl Streep makes an appearance in a film, we register her as a formidable actor. That is her primary identity.
It’s also a main reason why Streep’s performance in Out of Africa is one of her most interesting and makes Sydney Pollack’s film much more interesting than it would otherwise be. (I saw Out of Africa at the cinema when it first came out, thirty years ago; I guess I’d seen it a couple of times on video since then but never again until now on a big screen.) The BFI screening was introduced by Neil Brand, who spoke well and instructively about John Barry’s music. Brand pointed out, for example, the sparing use of the score’s main romantic theme: after the opening credits, it’s not heard again until the plane flight about halfway through the picture’s 161 minutes. Barry’s score is beautiful and sonorous but I was surprised that Neil Brand found it overwhelming enough to turn Out of Africa into what he clearly experiences as a glorious romantic drama. I was even more surprised by his concluding description of the movie as proof that ‘any of us could fall in love like this – with the right landscape and the right man’. One of the clearest messages of Out of Africa is that Karen Blixen’s great love, Denys Finch Hatton, is not the right man. As she says, in the last words of her eulogy at Denys’s funeral, ‘He was not ours. He was not mine.’ Nor is Kenya hers: at the end of the film, Karen goes back to Denmark, never to return to Africa. She doesn’t get to keep her man or the land she farmed, in spite of working hard for them both. What makes the film’s story fascinating is that – thanks in no small part to Meryl Streep’s salience on screen – the land doesn’t possess Karen Blixen either.
Karen Dinesen was born near Copenhagen in 1885, into a well-off bourgeois family. She married into Scandinavian aristocracy: after a failed romance with her Swedish second cousin, Baron Hans von Blixen-Finecke, she became engaged in 1913 to his twin brother, Bror. They moved to British East Africa, where their wedding took place the following year, and used family funds to develop a coffee plantation in Kenya. Sydney Pollack, the screenwriter Kurt Luedtke and Meryl Streep quickly convey essential aspects of Karen’s personality – her bossy sense of entitlement, her blundering impulsiveness. We see these qualities in her spur-of-the-moment switch from Hans to Bror (both played by Klaus Maria Brandauer); in the way she strides heedlessly into the men-only members’ bar of the Mombasa hotel where she and Bror will shortly exchange their marriage vows. Streep gives the character a singular combination of determination and self-doubt: throughout the film, Karen Blixen is a control freak who is easily made to look – and to feel – silly. As her train approaches Mombasa, the bride-to-be Karen is ordering African railway workers to handle with care the china and crystal she’s brought with her from Denmark; she also has her first encounter with Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford), although she doesn’t yet know who he is (a big game hunter, well known in the local colonial community). Hearing her chide the Africans, Denys makes a lightly sarcastic remark about the china and crystal. Karen’s concern with possessions and Denys’s reaction to this translate, in due course, into deep-seated tensions in the affair between them. Although he’s attracted to and admires her, Karen’s insistence on managing things, including their life together, pushes Denys in the opposite direction.
Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, written under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, isn’t easily adaptable into a big-budget romantic drama, and Kurt Luedtke also draws on two biographical studies of Blixen (Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Story Teller by Judith Thurman, and Silence Will Speak by Errol Trzebinski). Luedtke shows skill in organising the various source material, and developing the principal characters in Blixen’s episodic memoir, but the result is an accumulation of short scenes that often amount to no more than bits of a linear narrative that spans nearly twenty years. And though Sydney Pollack’s direction is intelligent, his storytelling lacks momentum. The cinematographer David Watkin’s palette is beautifully varied, and he achieves some wonderful lighting effects (especially nocturnal ones), yet Pollack, even in visual terms, sometimes seems to be going through the motions. Robert Redford’s Finch Hatton was widely ridiculed as a ludicrous example of star system casting. Redford’s acting is emotionally precise and eloquent but it’s hard to justify his thoroughly American interpretation of Finch Hatton, especially (a) since some of Denys’s lines make little sense if they’re not spoken by a British colonialist and (b) in light of Meryl Streep’s painstaking Danish-accented English. Having Redford in the role is seemingly premised on the idea that a member of Hollywood royalty is naturally right as a member of the British aristocracy. (It’s nearly inconceivable that a big American actor would be cast as Finch Hatton if the film were made today – when British actors are increasingly playing Americans in American movies.)
Redford is right in one important respect, though; in his case too, this rightness connects to his essential characteristics as a screen actor. As in The Way We Were, an earlier Sydney Pollack movie, Redford’s mixture of effortlessness and inaccessibility contrasts sharply with the acting style of his female co-star; as in The Way We Were, there’s a strong correspondence between the two stars’ differences of approach to performing and the dynamic of the relationship between the characters they’re playing. Karen Blixen always wants more of, and from, Denys Finch Hatton – just as Barbra Streisand’s Katie Morosky kept pushing for Redford’s Hubbell Gardiner in The Way We Were to become the man she was determined that he could be. (That relationship didn’t work out either.) Scenes which would have been romantic highlights between the leads in an old-style Hollywood picture don’t come to fruition as such in Out of Africa. Yet the not coming to fruition – the frustration that Karen and Denys, for different reasons, both feel – is absorbing. To be fair to Pollack and Kurt Luedtke, this sense of anti-climax is implicit in the script and direction; it isn’t only the result of what the actors do (and who they are). The big aerial sequence – Karen’s first experience of air travel, with Denys, in his bi-plane – is the most famous in the film, as the craft soars above spectacular African flora and fauna (the flamingos are outstanding). But John Barry’s music, even as it soars too, expresses an aspiration to happiness rather than the achievement of it. As Karen reaches her arm back to grasp the hand of the pilot, she conveys not only exhilaration but also (one might say heavy-handedly) a need for the exhilaration to be sustained.
The relative straightforwardness of Karen’s relationship with her husband is well conveyed. When she arrives in Kenya, she learns from Bror Blixen that he has invested their money not in the dairy farm they planned but instead in land for coffee-growing – a project doomed to economic failure. Bror is serially unfaithful to Karen and gives her a life-threatening case of syphilis into the bargain. (This necessitates her temporary return to Denmark for treatment and convalescence.) After they have separated, Bror keeps coming back to Karen for money. He’s so consistently a scoundrel that he’s relatively easy for her to cope with emotionally. Klaus Maria Brandauer’s well-judged playing of Bror shows us his charm without making him likeable. There are good supporting performances too from Michael Kitchen, as Denys’s friend, Berkeley Cole; Malick Bowens, as Karen’s head servant, Farah; and Suzanna Hamilton, as Felicity, a sexually ambiguous English equestrienne.
Karen narrates the film in retrospective voiceover and in one of Meryl Streep’s few unsuccessful accents. (It’s the only one, as far as I know, that has been jokingly parodied over the years – the repeated line ‘I had a farm in Ah-free-car …’ has been, anyway.) The awkwardness may be caused by the stress of both sustaining the accent and assuming the voice of an older woman. Streep was in her mid-thirties when the film was made. The book Out of Africa was published in 1937, when Karen Blixen was fifty-two; she died at the age of seventy-seven. I’m not sure how old Pollack and Streep mean the narrator Karen to be but she sounds excessively ancient. Still, it’s a compensation that the most effective part of the voiceover comes with the important closing lines. Streep’s voice throughout the live action of the story is far more convincing – she has other actors to spark her delivery of the lines – and this is another instance of her finding, through technical skill and imagination, plenty of humour in a foreign accent. She also realises most impressively Karen Blixen’s self-image – evident in her Seven Gothic Tales (1934) – as a kind of Scheherazade. Karen claims that she can invent a story from any opening sentence. After dinner with Denys and Berkeley one evening, the former sets her the task of doing just that. Meryl Streep’s storytelling is hypnotically charming. She concludes Karen’s invention for her rapt guests by fusing her own penchant for arresting gesture with Blixen’s determination to impress as a spellbinding teller of tales.
There are so many fine details in Streep’s work: the tension between self-assertion and timidity in her walk (and how this is modified when Karen’s gait has been affected by syphilis); Karen’s placing of her hand beside Finch Hatton’s on the arm of the chair in which he’s sleeping. The coherence of her portrait of Karen Blixen goes well beyond what the script supplies. When they first meet, at her wedding reception, Felicity admires Karen’s bridal dress but light-heartedly deplores her choice of hat. It’s the first of several hats in Out of Africa that does Meryl Streep no favours – the tight-fitting bonnets emphasise the length of her face and especially her nose. But the effect of this headgear is also to reinforce the viewer’s sense of the character that Streep has created. Karen is anxious to reach out to her closest friends, as well as to the Kikuyu house staff, farm workers and children for whom she sets up a school. Yet this pushy but fretful woman persistently finds herself boxed in – and often by her own nature.
As she prepares to leave the farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills, Karen Blixen disposes of household goods, including at least some of that china and crystal. Inside the farmhouse, though – when Bror arrives to tell her that Denys has died in a plane crash – Karen is surrounded by packing crates, ready for the return journey to Europe. At the end of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen muses as follows:
‘If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I have had on? Or will the children invent a game in which my name is? Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me? Or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?’
Her thoughts appear to express a regretful awareness of her unimportance in the vast of the region she has come to love and with which, as with Denys Finch Hatton, she seems to have longed for a union that she can’t have. Yet the very fact that Blixen asks these pathetically fallacious questions is testimony to her demanding egocentricity. You feel that, if Africa doesn’t know a song of Karen Blixen, it’s because she’s incapable of giving herself fully to the continent. She may have thought she wanted ‘that whole immersive thing’ but part of her remains a Danish haute bourgeoise who married into a title. She may have loved the landscape but she continued to stand apart from it. Those packing crates in the emptied house are an apt image of the cargo – the baggage, as we would now say – that she never loses.
19 November 2015
