Flak Magazine: Review of Beyond Borders, 10.31.03

When a media blitz springs up involving a movie, it's usually the movie itself that's at the center. Not so, it seems, with Beyond Borders, part of the Angelina Joliefest that the press has delighted in over the past few weeks. In fact, Borders aspires to be so much greater than the sum of its parts that the actual celluloid component doesn't contribute much to the equation.

Written as three largely disjointed vignettes, Borders tracks the buy-in of Jolie's high society American expat, Sarah, to UN refugee causes abroad in 1984 Ethiopia, 1989 Cambodia and 1995 Chechnya. (With more screen time and a tighter script, the train inevitably would have rolled into 1999 Kosovo, 2002 Kabul and beyond.) This, of course, ties into Jolie's much-publicized work as a United Nations High Commission for Refugees ambassador. The detail most people miss is that she began her UNHCR work shortly after reading the Beyond Borders script way back in 1998. Everyone heard that she adopted a Cambodian infant, but most don't know that her fervor led her to do it even at one of the most inconvenient times imaginable: square in the middle of a shooting schedule that took her to Canada, Africa and Thailand. She has also recently renewed her post and will maintain her diplomatic duties for at least two more years.

The timing of details like these, the fact that they're so plainly not Matt-Damon-at- the-World-Series- of-Poker-esque promotional stunts engineered to embolden the profile of Sarah, sell the notion that she has truly invested herself in this cause and this organization to such an extent that even a stick-figure animation of Beyond Borders could be made interesting through her involvement. Keying the release of this movie with the rise of Jolie's star and the national acclaim of her charitable work made this movie. It may have only made it mediocre, but it made Borders worthy of production.

The strength of Jolie's real-life goodwill is a necessary component to the limited success Borders achieves; in fact, Jolie's life sells the cause better than the movie itself. The script vacillates wildly between being a love story and being a cause infomercial. Sarah's intercontinental adventures are centered on the character of Nick Callahan (Clive Owen) — part medic, part renegade and all sensitive hunk. It's when Nick crashes a high-society fund-raiser with a malnourished child in tow that Sarah comes to realize the plight of the third world, and her voyages overseas are both about the cause and about the aloof doctor.

In terms of the nuts-and-bolts production, Borders rates well. The settings look as good as the leading lady and seem as dangerous as she once was. It could be the ever-present man-waving-a-gun, but at each site, the very real danger of a bullet is startling and far more real than most movies allow for. Most movies don't have the benefit of a Jolie-Owen dream team, either; the only acting that detracts is the work from a starving CGI baby in the desert. Jolie gets heartily outperformed by Owen, but again, this time two years ago when the movie was made, he was doing Gosford Park junkets, and she was actually doing this shit.

But as the romance takes its sporadic leaps forward, it's interesting to see where the UNHCR gets left behind. Before Sarah wins Nick, she's doing real down-and-dirty relief work, but if the climactic Chechnya chapter crystallizes anything about the UNHCR, it's that Sarah, like so many patricians, can easily find themselves pigeonholed into chairing precisely the same slim-profit fund-raisers that Nick protests in the opening scene. Her last flight of fancy is solely to rescue Nick from Chechen renegades. If it was to rescue Nick and do relief work, it would be a clearer progression of character and story, but her motivation is a mishmash of missing her true love and trying to escape the decadent give-where-it's-convenient society her Ethiopia trip absolved her of before.

Director Martin Campbell makes no attempt to explain away the years in between Sarah's foreign tours. Does it matter that Borders plays more like a miniseries DVD than a movie? Does it matter that Owen is as about as important to the movie as its poster suggests? Does it matter that Jolie's raft-sized lips are shut and pouty for most of the film, offering a grand total of about 40 lines? Not if you let the topic matter acquit it of all crimes.

Directors tend to try to have topic matter do just that in movies that appeal to liberal sensibilities (cf. The Life of David Gale, Kandahar). Hollywood must have been thrilled with Borders: It's a movie about (a) an upper-class heroine (b) working for peace in communist countries and (c) making the UN look sexy. Hell, Jolie sat next to Kofi Annan at the premiere of Borders and was awarded the UN Correspondents Association's Citizen of the Year award. Compound that with images of Owen, Britain's (and Blair's) top leading man, supplying Khmer Rouge with weapons and intelligence, and it's absolute bedlam. With that context, one almost anticipates Tim Robbins to show up as a Chechen sniper.

None of this is new; each studio's seasonal slate bears one heavy-handed message boat. Not every season has such timing working for it, though, with the calamitous world situation and the retreat of humanitarian organizations from Iraq. Beyond Borders isn't a good movie, but it serves admirably as the stick being poked in the side of political (or apolitical) Americana. Will real life ever imitate art the way Hollywood wishes it would? Who knows? What we do know is that until it does, Angelina Jolie is doing her part.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)