Reviews

Fifty years ago I was living in the Kenya highlands, only a few miles from the old Blixen farm. Not a great deal had changed since the 1920s, the period of the movie, which manages a reasonable re-creation. However, the background is unlikely to mean much to Americans, only confirming unreal stereotypes of the colonial British. Meryl Steep, as we have come to expect, is superb in the part; and in 2003 she co-narrated a wonderful documentary on the remarkable Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), to whom in fact she bears some physical resemblance. Robert Redford is badly miscast, and why the producers didn't get one of many superb English actors for the part I can't imagine. As a love story well told in what to most people will be an exotic setting, beautifully photographed, it should be highly rated, justifying its many awards.

Generally, I agree with the comments by Victor-65. But it's always hard to compress a pretty long book into a 2-hour movie. I think the producers have dealt with the essentials reasonably well. The acting of the principals, especially the reliable John Hurt as the village doctor, is excellent. And the atmosphere of a small Greek village of that era is re-created well. The Penelope Cruz character falls for the Italian while her Greek fiancé is away fighting with the partisans, not while he's still around. I stayed in Sami, on Kefallonia, where much of the film was shot, less than a year later, and it's a community still to some degree traumatized by what went on there during the war. They had many stills from the film on a big board on the waterfront, a sign of their approval and recognition of its general accuracy.

This is a much more faithful rendering of Greene's book than the 1958 version, which he disowned because it ignored his implied criticism of American involvement in frustrating the Geneva Accords, which had brought the French war to an end. In fact, Greene's book could be regarded as a thinly disguised historical account, and very valuable for that reason. Had it been honestly filmed in the first place it might have deterred misplaced American support for armed intervention in the 1960s. Many Americans still don't realize that the CIA advice to Eisenhower was that, had the elections mandated at Geneva been held, Ho Chi Minh might well have won 80% of the national vote. Eisenhower admitted that in vol. 1 of his memoirs, published in 1963 (and that date should resonate). The US set out to frustrate the holding of those elections (a strange way to promote democracy), and that is the background to Greene's book and this movie. The only false note (to the cognoscenti) is the casting of Caine, excellent though his performance is. The London Times and similar papers of that era would never have employed someone with a Cockney accent: in that era only true-blue Oxbridge types became foreign correspondents.