At the Movies: I Dreamed of Africa

By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Entertainment Writer

Audiences watching Kim Basinger in ``I Dreamed of Africa'' may find themselves daydreaming about more interesting movies.

This is Basinger's first film since her Oscar-winning role in ``L.A. Confidential,'' and what a difference ``Africa'' marks from that tense and twisting thriller.

Based on a real-life woman's forays in Kenya, ``I Dreamed of Africa'' presents gorgeous panoramas of the harsh continent. So gorgeous, in fact, that the landscape swallows up the characters, who somnambulate their way through this bleak, tedious melodrama of a movie.

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Basinger stars as Kuki Gallmann, a woman who flees her idle, semi-hedonistic life in Italy for a ranch in Kenya with her young son and new husband.

In one of the first of a bland stream of voiceovers, Kuki confides, ``This man has come into our lives, and for the first time in many years, I feel a sense of hope.''

Yet Kuki's supposed optimism is undermined at every turn, by an endless stream of mishaps and tragedies, by her own mournful demeanor and by a constant, depressing sense of doom that pervades the film.

Kuki gripes that her husband (Vincent Perez) is never home. She waxes badly poetic about how good she's become at being alone. She cautions her son - portentously - against keeping poisonous snakes in his collection of serpents.

``Looking into the night, I can see eyes staring back at me. I am afraid,'' Kuki laments. ``What have I gotten myself into? What have I gotten my son into?''

For someone who professes to love her new life in Africa, who tells the audience she has ``never been more alive,'' Kuki spends a lot of time grousing. Except for the occasional joyful scene, such as her revelry at chasing an elephant out of her garden, Kuki doesn't seem to have a bit of fun.

There's plenty of surface action - lion, buffalo and snake attacks, elephants slain for their ivory, highway robbery, a vicious windstorm. But the action plays out tiresomely, one nasty turn piled on another, compounding the movie's gloominess.

The film is based on Gallman's autobiography, so it can't avoid the eventual family calamities that befall her without fictionalizing key elements of her life.

Keeping things real doesn't help moviegoers, though. The film's dreary air of foreboding becomes positively funereal well before the hardest of hard knocks hit.

``I Dreamed of Africa'' so palpably, drippingly foreshadows the bad things to come that viewers are bound to wonder why Kuki can't see it coming and get out of Dodge.

The film does wrap up on a semi-positive note, with Kuki realizing that despite her adversities, she has become caretaker to a bit of Kenyan turf and the people and animals who live off the land. The inherent animal-rights message, however, is simplistic, coming across as nothing more substantial than that poaching is bad.

The movie is directed by Hugh Hudson, who made the captivating ``Chariots of Fire'' out of the ostensibly dry story of a God-fearing Olympic runner who won't compete on Sunday. Hudson also gave Tarzan a more high-brow treatment with his thoughtful ``Greystoke.''

The director is unable to breathe life into this tale of woman against nature, though.

What Hudson does accomplish is a glorious portrait of Africa and its wildlife. Too bad the humans never amount to more than pinpricks against the majestic horizon.

``I Dreamed of Africa,'' distributed by Sony, runs 112 minutes and is rated PG-13.