Beginning with memories I was but a boy taken to see Out of Africa because my mother was swept up in talk of romance surrounding the film's press reviews and because she was a long-time admirer of Robert Redford. I sat next to her, slowly eating my plain M&Ms and was nearly bored to tears. After leaving the theater without casting a backwards glance at a movie I considered too long and devoid of such Rambo-esque excitement as exploding bodies or naked people engaged in flagrante delecto I wrote off the year's Oscar winner as exhausting tripe.

Flash-forward a few years and we have more memories still. I was by now a man ready to watch Out of Africa under a new set of obligations and personal assumptions. I was also encouraged by the movie's reputation among friends and family members with whom I often disagree over the value of popular entertainments but who were, nonetheless, highly attached to this particular work. Turning down the lights in my living room, pressing my VCR's "Play" button, I watched the resulting filmed entertainment without the benefit of widescreen formatting or a stereophonic sound system. Two and a half hours later I was, in a single catchphrase, blown away.

Long disregarding the fact I've owned a CD copy of John Barry's magnificent soundtrack and forget about how Meryl Streep has consistently been among my favorite actresses, I was wholly unprepared for the impact of Sydney Pollack's Best Picture-winner. I wasn't ready for its epic sweep through African plains or its love story between people mixed up in political circumstances impacting their personal lives. Nor was I able to recall how awesome the landscape of the film's setting could be when acting upon a drama of obscure social values and unconquerable spaces.

What I faced as I pressed my VCR's "Rewind" button was a cinematic experience as powerful to me as most any other I'd previously known. The feeling was assisted in its effect since it was also so totally unexpected.

Still, I won't stake an unwieldy claim for the film since it's not without its problems and detractions. To do so would further encourage the uncritical, wholesale swallowing of worthless entertainments annually encouraged by marketing departments that have us watching bad Hollywood product without requiring there to be more in our movies. Yet to criticize the film too severely would be to undercut its emotional impact, aesthetic beauty and technical grandeur even if these results are based on assumptions one must accept or else avoid this movie all together.

For instance, one must disregard the fact Out of Africa is about a bunch of white people invading Africa to colonize its spaces, animals and people. Then one should be careful to never mind how the movie's nearly worshipful black-African supporting players bow their heads to the righteous beauty of white womanhood, Streep as the key example.

In fact, any consistent embrace of Africa beyond its use as a setting, playground, symbol for romantic devotion and hostile environment to the film's lead players is uniformly left off-screen. At the film's center is a group of white people who temporarily inhabit the "dark continent" and remain outside its unknowable wisdom. Therefore any effort to focus on native Africans is left along the movie's margins, though not without certain ruptures as when the leads encounter Masai tribesman or enter crowds of black faces that look upon them like the circus geeks they are in being caught under the wrong big top.

Like most any Hollywood film, even more independent American films acting within the paradigm supplied by Hollywood, Out of Africa is fundamentally racist. Not in the sense of whippings, torture and active pursuit of the slave trade or some other such action demonstrating that prejudice. No, Out of Africa is more elusive since its racism finds root in the Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke-derived memoir under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen that restricts criticism about the film to an individual writer's voice and experience. Thus, Pollack et all are merely the craftspeople translating Dinesen's written memoirs onto the screen through Kurt Luedtke's terrific script, David Watkin's brilliant cinematography and Barry's ethereal score.

However true this fidelity to a source may be, it's no less an excuse for what Out of Africa ends up being as a colonialist's reorganization of territory according to the whims of political doctrine, personal interest and the peculiar indulgence of romance. That Pollack's particular vision of this experience is so sensually pleasing exacts a price. His movie represents a high mark in filmmaking practice that is a genuine pleasure to feel washing through one's emotional floodgates and sensory organs. But it is also just another first world fairy tale inserted over the top of an entire continent's ages-old landscape and people like so many words tossed from the mouth of a telemarketer.

For that conflict of interest between the excellence of the film's artistic expression and its espousal of ideologically retrograde cultural politics I come away feeling trapped by the its overall effect. I'm uncertain about the film's point-of-view since it takes pains to use events from Dinesen's life like World War I, colonization, deforestation and industrialization to foreground Africa's early 20th century troubles even while privileging romance above all other considerations. I'm further confused about Dinesen's wisdom born from love, life and loss in Nairobi that is definitely not the dominant experience of white settlers overrunning black Africa but is, instead, the exception.

As an adaptation of historical memoir with full room focus on or de-emphasize what's considered unnecessary, Out of Africa could have addressed some of these questions. But as a romantic vehicle for Redford and Streep the film was allowed to set these critical concerns to one side and glow in the awesome delights of lovers in love.

Opening with a voice-over by an aged Baroness (Streep), we learn how, as a younger woman in Denmark, she was forced by circumstance to choose a marriage of convenience. Having been spurned by her Swedish lover she offered herself to his brother and her friend, the Baron Bror Finecke (Klaus Maria Brandauer), in exchange for her dowry that would let them start-over with a dairy farm in Kenya.

Leaving Denmark separately they reconvene in Nairobi where Karen learns how Bror has bought a coffee farm rather than purchase head of cattle. Angered by his untrustworthiness and further realizing his weakness for adultery, she accepts a greater responsibility for the farm and becomes an independent woman. Enjoying the servants at her disposal she becomes a leading player in her community and gradually strikes up a friendship with an adventurer named Denys Hatton (Redford).

When World War I interrupts the Africa colonies along with their European colonial powers, Kenya becomes a landscape of bush fighting and territorial struggle. Karen is forced into action and leadership unprecedented for a woman of her time and her newfound strength intensifies the difficulties of her marriage to Bror.

After the war she learns Bror has given her syphilis from which she barely recovers after a regimen of arsenic and bed rest back in Denmark. Returning to her farm, now sterile and more cynical, her coffee crop begins leading her into the feast or famine rights of agriculture just as Denys invites her along a safari trip.

Together they embark upon a kaleidoscopic trip through the plains, lakes and wildlife of the continent, eventually consummating their love one night by firelight. Afterwards they strike a bargain as lovers without the taint of legal contract meaning she runs her farming business and he continues on his safari adventures, returning to her whenever possible but without a clear understanding of the future.

Over time their love affair strains them both. She grows fonder of him but is less willing to grant him license to do as he pleases. Similarly troubled by her ideas of belonging and commitment he shies away from her and they break off their affair. Likewise her farm's pitch from wealth to poverty extends the limit of her bank loans until a fire finally wipes out her stores of coffee beans to finally bankrupt her.

Having already lost Denys and divorced Bror, she's left alone without prospects in a land beset by colonial organization. Her final effort before vacating her farm is to assist her native servants and workers with finding new homes on lands guaranteed them as a reservation for their continued livelihood. Pleading to the territory's new British governor, she's granted her request and sets about liquidating her estate.

Before leaving Africa, though, Denys re-enters her life but is tragically killed before their reconciliation is complete. Karen buries him on a hilly plateau and returns to her native Denmark a barren woman with stories in hand that she eventually turns into the memoirs published under the name of Isak Dinesen.

Filling in the ark of this tragic love story there are sequences of such breathtaking natural beauty it's difficult to find words to accurately describe what's on-screen. As a paean to Africa as an awesome landscape and geographical setting Pollack's movie wisely engages the wonder of its location shots to terrific impact. Suffice it to say that the Barry scored biplane trip where Denys takes Karen on an expedition through the eyes of God is a high point of the film.

Of course there are many smaller moments as well. Moments like Denys punctuating his comings and goings with gramophone recordings of Mozart or the fact that his entire characterization is more like a philosophical position complete with beautiful blonde hair than an actual person. Then there are moments from Karen's daily life on the farm, the gradual depiction of changing times with costume, dress, style and accoutrements like horse drawn buggy, cars and locomotives and, of course, there are shots of animals seen out in the wild.

All of this richness meant Out of Africa was budgeted at $31 million, no small sum in 1985. Regardless, the risk was well made in that the film was one of those seemingly rare titles that go on to critical acclaim and enjoy an accompanying commercial success.

Earning some $87 million at the domestic box office with a worldwide gross aided by an additional $152 million in the overseas markets it was one of the top box performers of its year. With seven wins from 11 Oscar nominations and three wins from among six Golden Globe nominations, its run on global moviedom seemed complete.

With the benefit of retrospect and my newfound excitement over Out of Africa despite certain critical reminders about what it isn't as a film, there seems little doubt it should have won the Academy Award for being the Best Picture of 1985. Competing for the top honors with The Color Purple, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Prizzi's Honor and Witness the only really criminal aspect of the movie-of-the-year race was the lack of mainstream recognition heaped upon Akira Kurosawa's Ran and Terry Gilliam's Brazil. While each of these films fascinated a small cadre of moviegoers they have continued on as influential pictures since their theatrical debut. Unfortunately for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Prizzi's Honor I cannot offer them the same support since neither one is worth reconsideration in having already long exhausted what kudos are due them.

As a simple summary, Out of Africa is an ideologically complex, emotionally satisfying, expertly produced drama that is wholly satisfying a decade and a half after its initial release. I expected to be disappointed after screening it a second time after my boyhood's earlier dismissal. Instead I was thrilled enough to enter its womb-like and seamless narrative only later to emerge with critical marks about what it evades as much as for what it embraces.

I can think of no more worthwhile remark to heap upon Pollack's film save for the fact I was moved into dreaming during its length. That doesn't excuse it's limitations but there were few things more important to me during the two and half hours I spent watching Out of Africa than its romance between the Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke and Denys Finch Hatton.