Just saw “Out of Africa” for the first time. It’s a stunning film. This has something to do with the combination of Meryl Streep’s slow, quiet voice and the expansive, serene vistas of Africa.

Yes, it’s also to do with the attacks of lions and with Robert Redford’s slow, quiet looks that hide a soul afraid of being caged in. And of course Karen and Dennis’s argument before the fireplace cuts to the dilemmas of the ‘plot’ of the movie: trust, independence, freedom, dependability. Those are the human problems the film presents. Very nice and interesting to talk about, but not what makes the movie so perplexing.

The film’s achievement is the lasting impression of peace it gives us despite the incredible disruptions at the end of its narrative. The answers to those human question are presented not by the unfolding plot but by those vistas, by that voice. The serenity of green and the roll of Karen’s slightly labored lilt are what make you close your eyes after the movie ends and keep imagining it is still going on. Karen has gone out of Africa, but Africa has not left her, nor us.

From our greatest losses–the film tells us, reminds us, enacts for us–something, an overwhelming something, lasts.

“Becoming Jane” ended with a caption that said, “Jane Austen went on to write six of the greatest novels in the English Language.” The suckiness that goes into that useless and wrong capitalization of “Language” is reflected throughout the movie. I know, surprise surprise–listen, I like to give these things a chance.

If one put aside historical realities, the movie became merely one of those vapid creations that so often pass for romantic comedies. It was chock-full of approbation for disobeying parents, disregarding prudence, and generally disavowing reason and intelligence.

If you didn’t put aside historical realities, of course, you’d find lots more things to be offended by: the number of times Jane takes off her hat in public, how she runs around and plays cricket with the boys, how she’s making out with her boytoy beneath that tree in some lady’s garden.

The best thing about the movie is that it didn’t end happily. I don’t mean that vindictively, I swear. I mean that the (historically-forced) ending alone shows a sense of independence from the typical romantic-comedy script–that sense of independence which Jane (in theory) values so very much. That it is missing from the rest of the film–with Jane falling unselfconsciously as she does for the village heartthrob and following him stumblingly from one end of England to the other–is perhaps not a surprise, but no less aggravating as a result. We are left with a sense that this isn’t the true Jane, the one with the wit and the shrewd whistle-blowing on middle-high society. The one that’s more Dr. Johnson than the Misses Brontë.

If it’s this wrong about its heroine, how do we know how much of Jane’s history the movie presents is actually true? How can we use it to add any kind of zing to our reading of her novels? What’s the point of this movie???

True, I am sure that Jane wrote her heroines to act as she *wished* she acted, and not as she in reality did. Lizzie Bennett’s wit is sharper and Eleanor Dashwood’s heart is steadier than Jane’s, most likely. Jane herself was likely correcting her foibles by the successes of her leading ladies. But if that were the point that this movie were trying to make, it needed to make it more deliberately and not, as I suspect, by pure accident.

Just watched “The Lives of Others.”[*Spoiler alert! If you just want my recommendation, you have it–go put this on your Netflix queue.] I spent the film dreading the ending more and more; while I couldn’t help but hope for some sense of human, concrete closure, I feared it too: how could it not be contrived, set against the gritty randomness, the blindness, the cold East-German reality of the rest of the film?

But instead of being incompatably precious, the end of the movie forcefully served as an appropriately nagging reminder of the other lives lost throughout, in the twin senses of those who were killed, and those whose lives in the end belonged to the East German state and not to themselves.

It’s a movie about one-way surveillance, and in the final minutes the tables turn: Georg is following his one-time Stasi surveillance man Wiesler, but, like Wiesler, he cannot bring himself to actually meet the man. And so the two are left to “meet” only in the dedication of Georg’s new book as Wiesler’s eyes read the note of thanks to his code name. The dedication reminds us of Wiesler’s failures as much as his strengths; it stands in the place where a dedication to Christa-Maria should have been had things not gone so horribly wrong; and above all, like the surveillance that dominates the film as a whole, it is at the same time intensely impersonal and intensely personal.

It’s a great ending that can simultaneously fulfill the hopeful human need of the watcher, and yet exist in harmony with the realism that leads up to it. It’s optimistic without being trite: it suggests that there is, after all, some hope to life, in whatever strange and demeaned form it may take–from the colorful graffiti on the now-open Brandenburg Gate to the obsessive actions of a grey operative watching and being touched by the lives of others.