Humanitarian efforts are backdrop for pretentious love story

By Margaret A. McGurk
The Cincinnati Enquirer

BEYOND BORDERS (R) Two and One-Half Stars (Fair-to-Good) Angelina Jolie stars as a socialite who falls in love with a renegade doctor dedicated to humanitarian work in war-torn countries. The film begins with good intentions, but by the time it ends, it looks less like a tale of global heroism and more like a soap opera. Clive Owen also stars for director Martin Campbell. Paramount Pictures, 127 minutes.

Inspired by the heroics of relief workers who year after year walk into the jaws of death, the screenplay by Caspian Tredwell-Owen misses no opportunity to explain just what horrific problems are being addressed by relief agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

On screen, such work is the backdrop and inspiration for a love affair between a pampered newlywed whose comfortable world changes forever when Nick Callahan (Clive Owen), a doctor who works with poor children in Africa, barges into a London charity gala with a refugee boy in tow.

Sarah Jordan Bauford (Angelina Jolie), whose marriage to Henry (Linus Roache) gave her entree to the wealthy British clan that funds the charity, cannot stop thinking about the angry challenge hurled by Nick to the wealthy partygoers.

She takes it on herself to organize a shipment of food and medical supplies to Nick's Ethiopian refugee camp.

When she arrives, Nick sneers at her do-good impulse as the act of a dilettante, but it doesn't take long before the two start to feel sparks between them. Sarah returns to London and goes to work for UNHCR — much as Jolie herself did after filming this movie.

Years pass before Nick's co-worker Elliot Hauser (Noah Emmerich) asks Sarah's help in getting supplies into an area of Cambodia controlled by the Khmer Rouge. She goes along on the trip, where she learns that Nick has made some kind of deal with the devil, here represented by an oily CIA agent (Yorick Van Wageningen).

Despite what amounts to a dangerous betrayal, and a near-escape from death after a terrifying tragedy, Sarah beds Nick before returning to her comfortable life. There is more left to happen between them after world events take Nick to Chechnya, but by then the movie has dissipated the urgency of its underlying message.

As the story unfolds, the focus narrows until it is almost solely tuned to the love story between Sarah and Nick. Perhaps the filmmakers feared compassion fatigue; it is indeed depressing to contemplate the ever-growing number of shattered spots around the globe where "civilization" has been reduced to scrounging for food and dodging bullets.

For example, director Martin Campbell pulls no punches in depicting the horrors of starvation. Images of the African dead and starving are shattering to see. The filmmakers used computer special effects to turn a healthy child into a shockingly emaciated baby that Sarah plucks from the desert sand when he is so near death a buzzard stands over him. (That image was borrowed from a famous news photograph of the era.)

But by the time the movie ends, it has ceased to look like a tale of global heroism and has come perilously close to a soap opera.

Despite the movie's faults, Jolie and Owen both deliver impassioned performances, intelligent and emotional in equal measure.

Rated R for language, war-related violence.