Angelina Jolie's turn as a rich white woman saving children around the world is just too much. And not enough.
By JANET K. KEELER
Published October 23, 2003
[Photo: Paramount Pictures]
Angelina Jolie is Sarah Jordan and Clive Owen plays Dr. Nick Callahan in Beyond Borders.
There is so much silliness in Beyond Borders that it's difficult to take seriously, despite the dire subject matter and heartbreaking scenes of starving children.
Most of the turn-your-head-and-snicker moments involve star Angelina Jolie, who is never quite convincing as the naive American bent on saving the world's refugees, one baby at a time. (In real life, Jolie adopted a Cambodian boy while working on this film.)
Jolie has too much Tomb Raider and Girl, Interrupted in her to play stupid, which she does and doesn't and then does again in this too-long film.
The costumers and makeup artists share the blame for glamming up Jolie so much that she looks out of step with her sweaty, tattered co-stars. Note to Hollywood: Real women get dirty, especially when they are in places with no running water.
She arrives in Ethiopia in snow white gauze with cloth espadrilles laced up her ankles, floppy hat and oversized sunglasses, the kind Britney Spears might wear clubbing. Her eyebrows remain perfectly arched and pencilled throughout the movie, and those famous lips are never without gloss, albeit in muted tones. In snowy Chechnya, a black fur hat hugs her flawless face. Dr. Zhivago, I presume?
For heaven's sake, even Princess Diana knew enough to wear denim to search for land mines.
Jolie plays pouty Sarah Jordan, whose British blueblood husband (Linus Roache, TV's The Gathering Storm) is a good, but bland, provider. Her father-in-law is a wealthy philanthropist who writes checks to help the afflicted around the world but doesn't want to get dirty himself.
Sarah's passions are stirred in every way they can be by handsome Dr. Nick Callahan (Clive Owen, The Bourne Identity and Gosford Park) who is part of an itinerant group of relief workers battling the worst health conditions on Earth. They meet when the maverick doctor crashes a London charity dinner with starving boy in tow.
Over 11 years beginning in 1984, Sarah follows Nick to the Ethiopian dessert, the jungles of Cambodia and finally, tragically, to war-torn Chechnya. By the time they get to the former Soviet Union, Nick isn't just a bleeding heart relief worker anymore. He's a spy.
That's just one of too many stories spun in Beyond Borders. There's Sarah's troubled marriage and her husband's infidelity. There's her sister (Teri Polo, TV's I'm With Her and Sports Night), the aspiring journalist who is conveniently reporting on the war in Chechnya by movie's end.
Director Martin Campbell crafts several effective dramatic scenes, including a gripping confrontation between camp workers and Khmer Rouge gunmen in Cambodia. The baby playing with a hand grenade is a breath-holder, for sure. Beyond Borders was beautifully filmed in Montreal and Quebec Provence, Namibia and Thailand, all effective stand-ins for the actual locations.
In the end though, that isn't enough to make up for the exploitive and imperialistic overtones of a love story set against a backdrop of Third World suffering. In one scene, seemingly inspired by Kevin Carter's 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a vulture ominously perching near a dying Sudanese child, Sarah shoos away a leering vulture inching toward a baby. She scoops up the gravely ill baby and demands Nick treat him. What becomes of the child? Not sure, but the image of the black baby being saved by the rich white woman will be offensive to some viewers. At the very least, it's unimaginative.
Beyond Borders
Grade: C-
Director: Martin Campbell
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Linus Roache, Teri Polo, Yorick van Wageningen
