Meryl Streep phoned it in

Possibly it took all she had for that accent. The pace of the movie -- it absolutely crawled -- made it all the worse. Redford was almost wooden. It was as if he thought the "Double R" smile would be enough. The only one who seemed to know how to act was Michael Kitchen, but he wasn't on screen long enough to make the thing interesting.

We now live in a day and age when a white woman who speaks of "her" natives, "her" children, in "her" school, and is in love with a man who swears he thinks more highly of the animals in Africa, but makes his living taking rich idiots on safaris to kill the same animals, grates on our sensibilities. We can see the blatant hypocrisy. Streep's character is supposed to be such a feminist, but spends a lot of the movie getting her sense of happiness and worth from men, then looking down on the indigenous people as being "hers." She hates the sense that men make the rules for her, but she wants to tell a native ruler what he can and cannot allow for his own people. If you want to see "White Privilege" in action, these people have it in spades.

It was a horrible mess. As my grandfather used to say, "It's a terrible death to be drug to death," and this movie dragged on and on, and was only about a woman who thought she was liberated, but really wasn't.