On Screen

...Alicia (Norma Aleandro) and Roberto (Hector Alterio) appear to lead a charmed life...

...The tragic tale of that era, its ongoing legacy in human suffering and destruction, unfolds in the happiest and most bourgeois of households...

...Ana's suspicions prompt Alicia to begin looking into the details of Gaby's adoption, which had been arranged by Roberto...

...Pollack has kept an attentive eye on the matter of period detail...

...He is an attractive and successful executive...

...The couple's idyll is interrupted by Ana (Chunchuna Villafane), a childhood friend of Alicia's who returns from exile and informs her of the truth about the desparecidos, as the tortured and murdered victims of the anti-Leftist regime were called...

...Without exhibiting any of the stony eminence Meryl Streep brings to her role in Out of Africa, Aleandro infuses Alicia with what I can only call the dignity of her anguish...

...In much the same way as she covered her syphilis-ravaged skin with layer upon layer of white makeup, she camouflaged the blemishes of her personality—distilling its essence so as best to captivate her readers...

...his elegantly bemused portraiture glances nicely off her more resolute approach to acting...

...Isak Dinesen, whose married name was Karen Blixen, was a consummate self-mythologizer...

...But if The Official Story—directed by Luis Puen-zo from a screenplay by himself and Aida Bortnik—is not the most politically hard-hitting of films, it succeeds in bringing home its message on its own undidactic terms...

...Hector Alterio is equally convincing as the ruthless yet demonstrably human Roberto, and Analia Castro as Gaby is a child to break one's heart...

...More important, Ana suggests that Alicia and Roberto's five-year-old may not have been legitimately come by—that she may, in fact, be the offspring of two desparecidos...

...In lieu of a central romance, Out of Africa the movie does at least offer peripheral consolations...

...the small and smooth-skinned Meryl Streep moves him not at all...

...In one of the more interesting stratagems of grandiose self-denial in the literature of memoirs, the call of the wild was reinterpreted for the naive reader as the call of romance, and Denys Finch Hatton, the big-game hunter Dinesen could seduce but not pin down to hearth and home, was transformed into a fittingly godlike creature, beyond the demands of the author's too-human claims...

...The film's relation to its putative subject, the Danish writer Isak Dinesen, is friendly but imperious: Whenever the facts of Dinesen's life, big or small, threaten to get in the way of the story line, they are shooed away—like pesky flies intruding on a scenic outing...

...Clearly, therefore, the air-brushed life that we now have on the screen is the version Dinesen would have preferred...

...Itmay be said, too, that the movie is less concerned with precise renderings than with evoking an emotional audience response...

...As played by Meryl Streep, Karen Blixen is a glowing-complexioned woman, impeccably dressed in a nouvelle-safari wardrobe, given to a fondness for lions and Limoges china...

...Undeterred by her husband's angry opposition or by the needle-in-a-haystack nature of her search, Alicia unearths horrifying evidence showing that the little girl she has raised from infancy is probably the child of a young woman killed for her political beliefs, and that her husband is inextricably linked with the forces of political corruption...

...What is uniquely simple-minded about Out of Africa is that it purports to create the myth-in-death of someone who has already beaten it to the creation during her own lifetime...

...Through the medium of unruffled, almost elegiac prose in her memoir, Out of Africa, Dinesen recounted the 19 years she spent in Kenya, always riding high above the harsh realities of her existence there...

...And what actor in the American cosmology flies closer to the sun—with his perennially golden hair and bright blue eyes—than co-star Robert Redford...

...Those of us in the audience who have read Judith Thurman's biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (one of several sources the movie draws upon), or who may know some of the more unpleasant truths of the tale that the movie doesn't let on to, can only look on wide-eyed at so much visually-pleasing effrontery...

...The problem with the film's unrelieved good-lookingness is that after about an hour it brings on the vapors...

...The film is set in Buenos Aires...

...The climax seems a bit overdrawn (Roberto, upon being confronted with his wife's drastic findings, reacts like the deadliest of henchmen, smashing Alicia's fingers in the door and then beating her up...

...It strides on to the screen with manifest intention, large-leagued and dressed for the climate...

...the year is 1983, almost a decade after the grim period of military dictatorship came to an end...

...Never mind that he plays the Oxford-educated Hatton without the faintest trace of an English accent, or that he acts as if he were in a doeudrama about animal conservation instead of a love story...

...His sapphire eyes light up once, when something large and furry comes into view...

...The Official Story depends for its impact on the vivid and enormously stirring performance of Norma Aleandro...

...Unlike many other movies whose orientation is political rather than purely personal—I think especially of those by Konstantinos Costa-Gavras—The Official Story chooses to work from the inside out...

...Similarly, her fascist-like reverence for the more ruthless aspects of the masculine mystique—as evidenced in the faithless adventurers she chose for both husband and lover—was artfully transposed into an admiration for the unstrictured, heroic spirit...

...Alicia seems more thoughtful than some of her acquaintances, as befits someone of her occupation, but she adheres to the official textbooks in her classroom and is resistant to the defiant tone of some of her pupils...

...Mike Bugara, as Karen Blixen's faithful servant, Juma, and Suzanna Hamilton, playingatomboywholooks to Karen as a model, are especially good...

...Dinesen, I think, would have approved...

...that seems like a just tribute to the conviction of its myth-making...

...The curiously hostile attraction between Karen and her penniless blue-blood of a cousin, Bror, is palpable from the first moment we glimpse them together and lingers even after they are no longer a couple...

...In addition, he has collected a group of skilled British and African actors for the smaller roles, and they do much to liven up the nerveless atmosphere around the two stars...

...There are several genuinely affecting scenes involving the mistress of the manse and her devoted servants and workers, and the opening scenes deftly sketch in the odd circumstances under which Dinesen embarked on her faraway marriage...

...Her union with Finch Hatton, however disingenuously characterized it may have been, animated the numinous tone of Dinesen's memoir by suggesting something of the flesh-and-blood...

...These dark allusions refer to the "dirty war" of the mid- and late-'70s, when the then government launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign and more than 9,000 Argen ¦ tinians vanished...

...Although I'm not sure that the method used to intertwine personal and political concerns bears a great resemblance to how personal revelations (much less political epiphanies) actually occur in real life, the film packs an emotional wallop that subsumes any such considerations...

...Rachel Kempson puts in a brief but scene-stealing appearance as the sympathetic wife of a visiting British dignitary...

...Within minutes of arriving in Kenya from Denmark, Karen has begun running the plantation of her new husband, Baron Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer), set a young native's leg with the skill of a practiced orthopedist, and decorated her primitive bedroom with enough lacey touches from home to give it an uncanny resemblance to an ad for Laura Ashley fabrics...

...As a contented member of the upper class, a loving wife to the harried Roberto and an enthralled mother to Gaby, Alicia has nothing to gain by paying attention to the provocative remarks of her students —such as, "History is written by the murderers...

...Out of Africa was produced and directed by Sydney Pollack, of Tootsie fame, from a somewhat taciturn screenplay by Kurt Leudtke...

...Ernest Hemingway, tellingly enough, was an ardent fan—from which I deduce merely that it takes one illusionist to know another...

...Her patrician, droit-de-seigneur inclinations became shrouded in the mists of her reiterated love of the land and her avowed feelings of kinship with her African servants...

...The film has garnered 11 Academy Award nominations...

...The most fascinating parts of the movie, by a long shot, also have to do with Karen and Bror Blixen: Due to the compelling presence of Klaus Maria Brandauer, the prelude to the drama of Dinesen's real life becomes the main act in her re-enacted one...

...Its focus is a single domestic situation and the way the political realities of recent Argentinian history first infringe on, then challenge, and finally radically alter it...

...They attend dinner parties with other wealthy, smartly-dressed couples, and have a tasteful and well-run home that is enlivened by the spirited chatter of their adorable, doted-up-on adopted daughter, Gaby (Analia Castro...

...The point is that Redford's regal jawline and careless approximation of a performing style look right...

...It is, of course, in the nature of biographical movies to simplify...

...the sheer physical evocativeness of the film's settings, its authenticity of context, cannot be faulted...

...There is just so much breathtaking panorama in the form of aerial shots of the African landscape, just so many of Karen's confrontations with the refractory soil of the coffee plantation, that the movie can carry before it starts to lose on the human-interest front...

...In her scenes with Brandauer, Streep seems to be playing more of a multifaceted character than she does elsewhere in the film...

...And the problem with the visible lack of chemistry between Redford and Streep is that what was in fact a complex relationship between two egoists is here rendered about as stirringly as a partnership between two yoked mules...

...The Official Story, about the aftermath of the military dictatorship in Argentina, brims over with the sense of irony—of fate's unexpected twists—so woefully missing in Out of Africa...

...she is a beautiful teacher of history in a prestigious private school...