Word: dinesen
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...