Beyond Borders: Movie, DVD Review

Directed by Martin Campbell, written by Caspian Tredwell-Owen, 127 minutes, rated R.

(Originally published 2003)

Politically charged and awash in melodrama, the heroically well-intentioned yet wholly misguided “Beyond Borders” is a manipulative travelogue of heartbreak and despair.

It moves glumly yet grandly about the globe, touching down just long enough in such hot spots as Ethiopia, Cambodia and Chechnya to shame audiences into feeling guilt about their comparatively comfortable lives.

While it’s hard at work at that—images of starvation, amputation, mass genocide and war linger interminably onscreen--the film also tosses in a little sex and a little skin to allegedly make all of this go down easier.

It doesn’t. Quite the contrary.

This shallow, uneven message movie uses a very real backdrop of human devastation to bolster its intercontinental romance. It wants you to realize how lucky you are, but it also wants to make you breathe hard while doing so. As a result, conflict is achieved, but so is a new brand of gross exploitation.

In the movie, Angelina Jolie, in full pucker, is Sarah Jordan, a wealthy American socialite living in London who stumbles upon her social conscience at a party in 1984. There, at a black tie fund-raiser, her life is forever changed when renegade Dr. Nick Callahan (Clive Owen) crashes the event with the press and an emaciated Ethiopian boy named Jojo in tow.

Speeches are made, social injustices are highlighted, Jojo is handed a banana and asked to behave like a monkey, which he does (no kidding). Suddenly, Sarah is hooked. Nick reeks of the sort of smoldering masculinity her soft husband, Henry (Linus Roache), sorely lacks.

Over the ensuing years, Sarah recklessly drops everything—her marriage, her kids--to follow Nick around the world, first to aid camps in Africa and Cambodia, where they have blistering, smoky trysts, and then in Chechnya, where she looks smashing in black mink. A wealth of plot inconsistencies ensue, but they are nothing when stacked next to the film’s true flaw: Who cares whether these two difficult, righteous people get together when all around them is such suffering?

Unable to make us care, “Beyond Borders” splits.

Grade: D