Stars: Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Teri Polo, Noah Emmerich
Director: Martin Campbell
Released: 10/2003
Rating: 1 stars

Oscar winner Angelina Jolie, in real life a UN ambassador for refugees, stars in a love story set against the backdrop of aid work in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya.

The film opens in 1984, where Sarah Jordan (Jolie) is a wealthy London socialite, recently married to the son of the founder of a charitable organization devoted to aiding starving children, Lawrence Bauford (Timothy West). That organization has just pulled out of famine relief in Ethiopia because of politicial instability there. Dr. Nick Callahan (Owen) is a doctor working in Ethiopia whose efforts depend on Bauford's funding. To protest the pullout, Callahan crashes an expensive dinner honoring Bauford. Moved by the display, Sarah liquidates her life savings to buy food and medicine for Callahan's camp and sets off for Ethiopia to deliver it. Thus begins the love story between Nick and Sarah.

After Ethiopia, Sarah goes to work for UNHCR (an organization for which Jolie has worked in real life) and Nick continues his aid work, later moving to Cambodia in the late 80's to aid victims of the Khmer Rouge and finally to Chechnya in the 90's.

As I've pointed out multiple times already, the work Nick and Sarah do in the film is something to which the real Angelina Jolie has also worked. It is obviously important to her. That's what makes the film so difficult to understand. The suffering and death is just a backdrop for a love story. As the story unfolds, the victims fade into the background. In Ethiopia, the victims are front and center. We meet some of them. In Cambodia, they are window dressing, extras in the background who we see but never meet. Finally, in Chechnya they completely disappear. We don't even see them anymore. Why would Jolie associate herself with such a film? After diminishing the victims they are trying to help in the name of a love story, the film is dedicated to the aid workers around the world! I guess it's dedicated to providing hope that all of them might get to meet one of the beautiful people like Jolie and Owen, fall in love, and get their minds off the suffering around them.

Furthermore, Sarah is painted as a character motivated out of old fashioned liberal guilt. She lives a comfortable life in London and feels guilty about it when she sees the suffering in other parts of the world. So she tries to help, to make herself feel better. It's not about the people, it's about her salving her conscience. Late in the film, we see Sarah having risen high in the ranks of the UNHCR, and again see the guilt as she has flashbacks to Nick's disruption when she starts to give a speech at an expensive lunch to honor her. Nick at least is portrayed well. He has learned tremendous respect and admiration for the people he is helping. He does not pity them (there is such arrogance and condescension in the word "pity", just as there is in "charity"). Rather, he admires and respects them. Nick has learned the true meaning of courage and strength by watching these people deal with suffering, a lesson we never get the feeling Sarah has learned.

An early scene to me shows just how misguided this film is. While driving out to the Ethiopian camp, Sarah seens a horribly emaciated child facing a vulture waiting for the child to die. Sarah orders the truck stopped, and picks up the child and his dying mother to take them to the camp. Nick takes a quick look at both and decides they are too far gone to help. Sarah insists and ultimately the child appears to be saved (we are never actually told that, but it is implied). The scene seemed to me to be trying to say that Nick had become jaded, numbed by the death around him, and that Sarah was reigniting that idealism. But how many other children in the same predicament did Sarah drive past on the road and not stop to help? Nick is pragmatic: they cannot all be saved so he has to pick and choose. Sarah is concerned about this one child so she can feel she has done something. This sequence reinforces the image that Sarah is out to make herself feel better about herself.

So having sacrificed a worthy story for a love story, does that story at least work? No. There is no chemistry between Jolie and Owen. To me, their relationship is just not believable. Over the course of 10 years, they spend perhaps 10 days together, mainly in Ethiopia but with a few extra days in Cambodia. This is to be the foundation of a love so strong they she will risk her life in a naive attempt to rescue him from abductors in Chechnya? No, I cannot believe that. It just seems like some executive decided that if two beautiful people are on screen together, there must be a love affair between them. They are beautiful for goodness sake!

The acting is mediocre. Jolie has won an Oscar, so we can assume she knows something about acting and emotional range. While watching the Ethiopia portion of the story, I wanted to yell out, "Time for a new emotion, Angelina!" She has one facial expression and one emotion the whole time she's there. Owen at least brings a presence to the screen. I've heard that he is being considered to be the next James Bond. I certainly think he could bring it off. I always like Teri Polo (she grew up in the same small town in Delaware--they are all small--as I did, and at the same time, though I do not know if I ever met her in the mall or someplace), but she does not have much to do here.

In short, Beyond Borders is a disappointing and ultimately insulting film. Ugh.

Last updated 03/30/2004 09:00 AM