Word: finche
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...players in the tragedy. Pondering on what it would be like to be Menelaus, Thersites remarks "to be an ass, were nothing, be is both ass and ox; to be an ox, were nothing, he is both ox and ass. To be a dog, a mule a cat, a finch, a toad, a lizzard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a toe. I would not care, but to be Menelaus, I woud conspire against destiny." Scratching her head, pulling at her suit of rags and slobbering over a bottle of brew, Fasolino's Thersites is convulsive. Excellently staged...