I dreamed of something better. Review on I Dreamed Of Africa Movie

We've all dreamed of Africa, and our dreams probably look pretty much the way they do in Hugh Hudson's beautifully shot dramatic travelogue -- like grand, aerial National Geographic specials. In reality on the ground, we realize when we wake up, things would be bound to look different.

That's pretty much what Kim Basinger's character, the real-life Kuki Gallman, experiences in I Dreamed of Africa. A rootless, unhappily divorced single mother(albeit a seemingly pampered and wealthy Italian one), Kuki is galvanized by a shocking near-death experience to follow her insistent inner voice, which is telling her to go to Africa. With a new husband, Paolo (Vincent Perez), and her young son, Emanuele (Liam Aiken), she ends up as owner of a dilapidated Kenyan ranch named Ol Ari Nyiro (where the real Gallmann lives to this day). This is where the dream hits the ground and she has to wake up.

Although Basinger's in-character voiceover keeps talking about how wonderful and healing this whole experience is, Gallmann seems to spend the rest of the movie is a sort of angry sulk, which is not a very appealing visage to watch for extended periods. No one seems to listen to her; indeed, two people who matter to her very much rebuff her advice and end up dead, which you may rest assured does not improve her mood. And yet we keep hearing about what a perpetual epiphany living in Africa is.

What further renders I Dreamed of Africa unconvincing and perplexing is director Hudson's infuriating way of introducing an idea -- Kuki starts helping a local tribe, her husband gives her a special egg with a message inside, and so on - and then the scene is dropped, with no resolution, because Hudson takes us off somewhere else, but we don't get a payoff there, either. Yet that's nothing compared to the vacuum that exists between the aerial footage and the human interaction, as if people we are meant to care about don't actually live in the same Africa we've just been shown from several thousand feet.

Nothing about I Dreamed of Africa is integrated in a way that tells us a story about real people, and yet we know that the people were real. Instead, we're presented with simply a series of truncated events, mostly grim, some actually boring, accompanied by a unkind Maurice Jarre score I defy anyone to recall five minutes after leaving the theatre.

It doesn't help matters that this film is being released at a time when the idea of white farmers in Africa will make most people think of the escalating crisis in Zimbabwe. The folks in this tale, whatever it's

about, seem sadly out of their depth and ought never to have gone to Africa in the first place. Surely this means that I Dreamed of Africa got things horribly wrong.