The reviews split almost evenly, and the one thing nearly everyone agrees on is the scenery. Critics on both sides call the Kenyan location photography ravishing, and most also single out Meryl Streep, whose intelligent, intense Karen Blixen is credited with making the story believable even by those who find the film around her thin. The warmest notices treat it as a large-scale romance done properly, well written and directed, with Streep and Robert Redford convincing in the difficult emotional scenes.
The reservations cluster on the affair at the centre. Several critics find it wispy or nebulous, a love story without enough electricity to carry two and a half hours, and Redford’s casting is named as a weakness more than once. The spread is wide, from outright admiration to dismissal as a preened, self-satisfied soap opera. Notably, the harshest verdicts come from later reappraisals: Empire and Time Out are far colder than most of the original 1985 reviews.