Ebert describes the movie Pearl Harbor, as a two-hour movie squeezed into three
hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an
American love triangle. In that same spirit, the movie Beyond Borders is the
tragic tale of world suffering that stands between Angelina Jolie and the love of
her life.
Jolie is Sarah Jordan, a rich young pouty thing, recently married and living in
London. While attending a gala fundraiser, her life is turned upside down by the
dashing Dr. Nick Callahan, who breaks into the party with a starving Ethiopian
boy in tow. It's all quite horrid. Nick wants the spoiled rich to see hunger
firsthand and give him what he needs for his famine relief work. All Sarah can
see is Nick.
The year is 1984 and Sarah immediately decides to use all her savings to buy food
and fly it to Ethiopia herself. She stays for three days. The film then jumps to
1989, back in England, where Sarah now has a son--he looks about 6 and he is in
school, so I wasn't really sure where he came from. She's now working for UN,
which is handy, especially when she finds out that Nick is now in Cambodia and
could use some help. Off she goes with more trucks, paid for by the UN this time,
not her own savings.
Jump forward five more years, and Nick is in trouble again, this time in
Chechnya. Sarah now has two children, but she quickly packs a few coordinated
ensembles and flies off.
Beyond Borders trips over itself badly and yet there's still fodder here for
thought. As a hero, Dr. Nick certainly likes action and adventure. He leaps from
one world crisis to another--Ethiopia, Cambodia, Chechnya--in a desperate attempt
to do some good. But his teleological ethics--the end justifies the means--make him
a troubled hero.
As a romantic hero he's smolderingly handsome and self-absorbed. His desire to do
good seems to come from a need to make him feel better about himself, but maybe
that comes from the film, where the people Nick is there to help are but props to
give the film a place to hang its hat.
Angelina Jolie as the petulant Sarah is similarly emotionally flawed. She has a
husband and a child but rather than put in any effort to her marriage, she seems
more keen to guard the flame for the "ultimate" romance with Dr. Nick.
I'm something of a ping-pong ball on this one. I felt that movie cheapened the
plight of world hunger into a setting for a steamy love story and that irritated
me. I felt that Nick and Sarah were modern day Romeo and Juliet who needed to
spend six months living together to get over their lust and realize that real
love is hard work. But that wouldn't make a movie, would it?
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