Best Picture Winners – Bitch Flicks

Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in 'Out of Africa' — Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in *Out of Africa*

My name is Robin and I am a white person living in Africa. Cape Town, South Africa, to be specific, although Hollywood wouldn’t be, because Hollywood’s Africa takes the continent’s 30.2 million square kilometers of land, 57 countries, and population of over 1 billion, and reduces it to a whole lot of this:

Hollywood’s Africa has three types of people: poor kids you can sponsor for the price of a cup of coffee a day, antiquated tribes living in huts, and most importantly: white people. And Hollywood thinks white people in Africa are definitely the most interesting.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think my life is super dupes interesting. I mean, this morning I dropped a container of yogurt and it exploded! Real stuff. But if you wanted to make a movie set in Africa, why would you zero in on a white immigrant? I’m really not the person to tell the story of an entire continent (obviously NO ONE IS, but that wouldn’t stop Hollywood from trying).

Karen with her husband Bror and her future lover Denys

1985 Best Picture winner Out of Africa typifies this fixation with white people in Africa. Based on her memoir, it follows Danish Baroness Karen Blixby (Meryl Streep) as she settles in Kenya with her husband of convenience, Bror. He wants her money, she wants his title, and they both want escape, so while they discuss going anywhere in the world (“Well maybe not Australia”) they choose British East Africa for reasons the film isn’t bothered to sort out. Cut to one of the many scenic vistas that make up roughly a third of Out of Africa‘s two hour 40 minute runtime (because long = “epic” = Oscar).

Bror turns out to be a fool (planting coffee where it can’t grow) and a philanderer (with bonus syphilis!), so his marriage to Karen does not last. Fortunately Karen can move on to Robert Redford’s super hunky big game hunter Denys. Karen and Denys’s affair is the heart of the film, and the reason for most of its (now faded) acclaim: Streep and Redford have strong chemistry and I found myself smiling and sighing and getting weepy at all the key moments. But it’s not particularly different from any other Hollywood romance, aside from the close encounters with lions. Is Karen and Denys’s love somehow more romantic because of the “epic” “sweeping” backdrop of Africa? A Best Picture Oscar suggests this is the case.

Karen and Farah meeting Kikuyu chief Kinanjui

In Out of Africa, Black people are just part of that “backdrop.” The only non-white character with any sort of a role is Karen’s right-hand man Farah, but he seems to exist to facilitate her life and is not fleshed out as a person at all. The Kikuyu people who live on “Karen’s” land are essentially scenery, despite the famous scene where Karen drops to her knees to beg on their behalf to the Governor. Meryl’s motivation to win an Oscar completely eclipses Karen’s motivations, because the rest of the movie is her having interpersonal drama with other white colonialists (well, that and all those scenic vistas).

'Blended' is a more recent (and particularly horrifying) example of Hollywood making movies about white people in Africa — *Blended* is a more recent (and particularly horrifying) example of Hollywood making movies about white people in Africa

Out of Africa is 30 years old, but Hollywood hasn’t tired of making movies about white people in Africa. See last year’s Adam-Sandler-and-Drew-Barrymore-on-safari romcom Blended (wait, no matter what you do, DON’T see that). Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener. Leonardo DiCpario and Jennifer Connelly in Blood Diamond. From my childhood, I remember little Reese Witherspoon and Ethan Embry escaping poachers in A Far Off Place; and The Power of One, which illustrates prejudice in Apartheid-era South Africa by telling the story of a white boy bullied because he is English and not Afrikaans. Really. When I was 8 years old I thought that movie was very powerful. Now I think making a movie about Apartheid starring white people is really gross. (Even when the story is just a metaphor for Apartheid, Mr. Blomkamp!).

Africa is beautiful, but it isn’t just pretty scenery to put behind white people. Its political and economic problems (which were all largely caused by white people!) aren’t there to create dramatic stakes for your white characters. There are so many African stories to tell that are about Africans. Hollywood, please show us some more of those.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town and this is the last time she gets to use that byline because she is headed out of Africa (geddit, that’s why I reviewed this movie now *wink*).

Written by Robin Hitchcock

Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment

Terms of Endearment has a lasting reputation as a melodramatic, emotionally-manipulative chick flick. This is a film that grossed over $100 million (an even more significant benchmark in the early 80’s) and won five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for James L. Brooks, Best Actress for Shirley MacLaine and Best Supporting Actor for Jack Nicholson). If Nicholson’s performance as astronaut playboy Garrett Breedlove had been shuffled into the lead actor category (I didn’t do an exact minute count, but I’m fairly certain he appears in as much if not more of the film than Anthony Hopkins did for his Best Actor winning performance in Silence of the Lambs) Terms of Endearment would join that film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and It Happened One Night in the rarefied Big Five Sweep club.

But Terms of Endearment is now oft-cited as one of the worst Best Picture winners and an example of the Oscar’s fleeting fascination with family dramas instead of “Important” issues. 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer and 1980’s Ordinary People also make worst best picture lists, at least in part because they “unjustly” beat out Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull for those top prizes. Those also-rans are undeniably powerful films that have had a lasting impact on cinema, but is part of what made their “worthiness” of the title Best Picture their focus on men? [See also Shakespeare in Love’s much-derided win over Saving Private Ryan].

James L. Brooks, Shirley MacLaine, and Jack Nicholson with their Oscars for Terms of Endearment

The muddled legacy of Terms of Endearment, and the seeming unlikeliness that such a picture would find such box office and awards success today, supports my fear that movies focused on women are seen as inherently less important and respectable. When I was watching Terms of Endearment this week, all traces of its reputation fell from my mind as I fell into simply enjoying watching the film. It is incredibly easy to be swept into caring about the lives of Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger). Their mother-daughter dynamic is very recognizable: they are eternally frustrated with each other but nevertheless co-dependently needful of each other’s love, and can switch from delightfully supportive of the other person’s happiness to cruel about the other person’s problems and back in seconds. These relatable characters are made alive by incredible performances, and the film is generously sprinkled with the winning dialogue (“I don’t think I was treating her badly.” “Then you must be from New York.”) and memorable moments (Emma and Aurora instantaneously making up over the phone after Aurora has boycotted Emma’s wedding) that create that undeniable feeling of “movie magic.”

For a so-called melodrama, Terms of Endearment‘s plot is actually quite true to life. Emma and her husband Flip (Jeff Daniels) move to Iowa for Flip’s stalled academic career; their relationship falters as they struggle with money and child rearing and both take on affairs. Aurora has an opposites-attract fling with her self-satisfied cad of a neighbor (Nicholson), who eventually shows surprising tenderness toward her. These are the kinds of things that happen all the time in the lives of people we know but are hardly ever seen in movies. Emma’s affair with her banker Sam (John Lithgow) is presented as two people filling emotional and physical needs outside of their marriages, not as an epic romance that cannot be because of the constraints of society a la Anna Karenina and countless other works of fiction.

Aurora and Garrett in bed.

How is that melodrama? And how refreshing is it to see a wife and mother having extramarital sex be portrayed sympathetically? It’s even more refreshing to see a sexual relationship between two fifty-somethings treated as normal and—get this—sexy. They’re even played by actors ROUGHLY THE SAME AGE (contra Jack Nicholson’s next Oscar-winning romance with a woman a quarter-century younger than him in As Good as It Gets).

I’m guessing that the accusations of sentimentality mainly come about from the film’s third act, in which Emma discovers she has terminal cancer and dies. There are some very emotionally fraught scenes, like the Oscar clip reel-bait in which Aurora takes out her pain and frustration at watching her daughter die by screaming at the nurses that Emma needs a shot of pain medication. The most famous scene in Terms of Endearment may be Emma saying goodbye to her children when she knows she is dying. The scene does not hold back: her oldest acts sullen and distant, her younger son cannot hold back his sobs, and Emma finds the strength to say the exact right thing to each of them (including: get haircuts). I don’t think the choice to share such an emotionally raw scene with the audience should be dismissed as “manipulative.” It’s certainly no more manipulative than the countless examples in fiction where people just miss their chance to say goodbye.

Emma says goodbye to her sons.

Desperately attempting to find closure with a dying loved one is something that most people experience at some point in their life. Presenting a common problem with unflinching honesty is in fact THE OPPOSITE of melodrama. As such, I’m pretty sure that “Terms of Endearment is a sentimental melodramatic manipulative tear-jerker” is just another way of saying, “It can’t be good if girls like it.”

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa who would like to get one look at Des Moines before she dies.

Tag: Best Picture Winners

‘Out of Africa’ Shows Hollywood’s Fixation with White People in Africa

‘Terms of Endearment’ IS NOT a Melodrama