`Africa’ tempered by good acting

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In theaters

I DREAMED OF AFRICA. Directed by Hugh Hudson. Written by Paula Milne and Susan Shilliday, based on the book by Kuki Gallmann. Running time: 112 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Initially, Hugh Hudson’s “I Dreamed of Africa” comes off like one of those amusing television miniseries by Judith Krantz, where a beautiful woman is swept off her feet by a handsome stud and whisked away to all sorts of romantic danger in another country.

In Krantz’s world, the woman is always bold, part of the fashionable jet set, yet restless and looking for a change that will result in some sort of personal growth that goes beyond a shopping spree at Gucci or deciding not to buy a $1,500 pair of Prada slingbacks.

“I Dreamed of Africa” shakes off that chilly feeling within 20 minutes. The film is no “Out of Africa,” which it’s being unfavorably compared to, but a movie that, to quote its characters in their description of Africa, “moves in its own rhythm.”

Based on a true story, the film follows Kuki Gallmann (Kim Basinger), a woman of privilege whose life in Italy is interrupted by a nasty car wreck that results in a broken leg and a hot romance with Paulo (Vincent Perez), the man who nearly killed her in the car wreck. Let’s just say that Kuki is forgiving.

She’s also ripe for adventure. In a flash, she’s married Paulo and fled with him and her son, Emanuelle (Liam Aiken at 7 and Garrett Strommen at 17), to a run-down ranch in Kenya. Kuki’s snob of a mother, Franca (Eva Maria Saint), disapproves, but there’s no holding back Kuki, who is soon fighting off elephants pillaging her herb garden, building mud dams with bravada, dealing with too much personal loss and pain for one person to bear, and getting a whole lot stronger because of it. Good for Kuki.

Thanks to a great deal of restraint from his cast, Hudson’s film isn’t the melodrama it seems on paper, but a drama tempered with good acting and lifted throughout with Africa’s stunning, sprawling, wide-open landscapes. Some might feel the film doesn’t have much of a plot, and they’d be right. Still, for me, that’s what sells it.

Grade: B

AMERICAN PSYCHO. Directed by Mary Harron. Written by Harron and Guinevere Turner, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R.

Violence as an extended metaphor for something deeper is hardly new, so it’s to Mary Harron’s great credit that she makes it seem new, fresh and exciting in “American Psycho,” her feminist take on Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial, 1991 best-selling novel.

Mirroring the film’s serial-killing psychopath, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale in a breakout performance), Harron proves she’s just as adept with a knife. As the film’s co-screenwriter, she has successfully trimmed off much of the novel’s underlying fat, streamlining Ellis’ rampant use of brand names and over-the-top bloodletting while staying true to the novel’s satirical concept: the greed of the 1980s as realized by an ax-wielding, head-severing, junior master of the universe.

As a female director in a town run almost exclusively by men, Harron must have come up against men as pompous and as ridiculous as Bateman, so it’s with a clear eye that she goes about exposing Bateman for the insecure, inept, incompetent fool that he is.

If the film’s unflagging energy is any indication, Harron clearly had a great time doing so.

Mixing horror with sharp humor, wit with graphic violence, Harron mines the truth out of what can politely be described as an imperfect man living in wildly imperfect times. Her film is important; it forces us to reconsider the 1980s while also asking us to look hard at its soulless characters and find ourselves in them.

That takes guts, which, when Harron isn’t spilling them on the floor, “American Psycho” has in spades.

Grade: B+

On video

AMERICAN BEAUTY. Directed by Sam Mendes. Written by Alan Ball. Running time: 120 minutes. Rated R.

Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty” may not be an original, but it does what few contemporary films do — it tells the truth about the world in which we live.

Recalling Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm” in tone, Todd Solondz’s “Happiness” in content, and Alexander Payne’s “Election” in its biting depiction of a woman who will do anything to succeed, the film, which won Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, follows Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a horny, boozy, 42-year-old frump of disillusionment primed to drop out of life.

Physically exhausted and emotionally dead, Lester is a bitter piece of work whose brittle smile conveys poison, rage, frustration and sadness. He’s been forced out of his job of 14 years, his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), has worn a hole in their marriage by scratching and clawing her way to the bottom of the real estate business, and his teen-age daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), hates him for losing interest in her.

Unloved, unsung, unhappy and unwilling to do much about it, Lester buys bags of pot from the boy next door (Wes Bentley) and sinks into a fantasy life that’s so rich, it would make Walter Mitty swoon: He quits his job, ignores his wife’s torrid affair with the self-described “king of real estate” (Peter Gallagher), and starts pumping weights in an all-out effort to reclaim his youth and to get his daughter’s best friend (Mena Suvari) into bed.

Daring and brash, Mendes — the British director of Broadway’s “The Blue Room” and “Cabaret” — uses his cinematic debut to get to the core of the American experience.

That he succeeds is one triumph, but there are others: He mines an excellent performance out of Spacey, who took this year’s Academy Award for Best Actor, and he brings Bening’s career back on track by recognizing her strengths. Just as she proved in 1991’s “Bugsy,” the actress is best when throwing a fist, a barbed insult or firing a gun.

In “American Beauty,” she does all three.

Grade: A

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appearMonday and Thursday in the NEWS, Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”

THE VIDEO CORNER

Renting a video? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

American Beauty A Bringing Out the Dead B- The Straight Story A Anywhere but Here B+ Being John Malkovich C+ Dogma F Galaxy Quest B+ Fight Club B+ Flawless C- Music of the Heart B Tumbleweeds A The Bachelor D+ End of Days C+ The House on Haunted Hill F Mumford A- Stuart Little B- The Insider B+ Superstar B+ Three Kings A- Three to Tango D- Boys Don’t Cry A For Love of the Game B The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Ark C- The Phantom Menace B Jakob The Liar D Last Night B- The Sixth Sense A- The Omega Code F Pokemon: The First Movie C- Crazy in Alabama C Drive me Crazy C+ Guinevere A- The Limey A Outside Providence C+ Eyes Wide Shut B+ Buena Vista Social Club B+ The Bone Collector C+ Twin Falls Idaho A The Best Man B Random Hearts C- Stigmata C- Bats C Brokedown Palace C+ Double Jeopardy B- An Ideal Husband A- The Story of Us D The Astronaut’s Wife D- The Winslow Boy A- Runaway Bride C-