Beyond Borders
Making ''Beyond Borders'' apparently affected Angelina Jolie so deeply that the actress has since become a good-will ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and has traveled to relief camps in all corners of the globe. If she's able to raise awareness and funds for people who desperately need food, medicine, and shelter, then the film has to be considered a humanitarian success.
Which is good, because as a movie, it's junk.
Worse than junk, in fact. ''Beyond Borders'' so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious. It's less about human suffering than about the nobility of rich movie stars being moved by that suffering, and the goofy romantic melodrama that takes over the plot -- think a tax-deductible ''Out of Africa'' -- is prime evidence of delusional Hollywood thinking. Maybe US audiences wouldn't want to see a movie about relief workers if the white leads didn't eventually tumble onto a cot for some soft-focus nookie. It's still a bad idea.
When we meet her in 1984 London, Sarah Jordan (Jolie) is the pampered young American wife of a London businessman (Linus Roache). Stunned and shamed by the gate-crashing appearance at a charity ball of Dr. Nick Callahan (Clive Owen, the thinking-woman's hunk of ''Croupier'' and ''Gosford Park''), Sarah signs up to ferry grain to his refugee camp in Ethiopia. Her bleeding-heart illusions are quickly shredded by the sight of real blood, not to mention squalor, death, and corrupt government officials, and for a brief spell ''Beyond Borders'' looks as though it might be about the people it pretends to be about. Don't worry: We still have 15 years and several more global hot spots to go.
Jolie looks so immaculately beautiful in those opening scenes that director Martin Campbell can't keep his camera off her. He filters all that tragedy through Sarah's teary gaze and keeps the Africans at arm's length. If the starving child the heroine saves doesn't look quite real, it's because he's not -- the filmmakers have digitally altered the young actor's face for maximum monster-movie impact. Besides, Sarah and Dr. Nick have been smoldering at each other from frame one, so it's clear where the movie's interests lie.
The good doctor has his own issues. Unlike his cheerfully diplomatic second-in-command, Elliott (Noah Emmerich), Nick suffers fools not at all, and Owen initially makes the character's bursts of spleen both entertaining and on point. Much more problematic is Nick's dealings with a shadowy CIA operative named Steiger (Yorick Van Wageningen), who provides cash to keep the camps going in exchange for gun-running favors. Such compromises may or may not actually occur in the real world of nongovernmental organizations, but to suggest they're standard operating procedure, as ''Beyond Borders'' does, is irresponsible to the point of slander. I'd dearly love to be present at a relief workers' screening of this film.
Certainly that audience would hoot as Sarah follows Nick first to the Cambodian border (where she dresses mostly in Lara Croft black) and ultimately to Chechnya (where she sports a fetching little fur cap). There the grand passion that has turned her marriage back home into a sham builds to genuinely lunatic heights of sacrifice and soap opera. By then, all those pesky refugees have conveniently disappeared.
The people responsible for ''Beyond Borders'' would probably insist that their film at least calls attention to the difficulties and urgencies of humanitarian aid around the globe. So it's worth asking: Is a movie like this better than nothing? Yes. But it's also a lot worse than necessary.
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