Based on Stefanie Zweig's autobiographical novel, German director Caroline Link's Oscar-nominated epic Nowhere In Africa follows a Jewish family that flees Nazi Germany before the war, giving up a life of privilege for the remote farmlands of rural Kenya. The scenario is charged with dramatic possibilities, as the family struggles to readjust to a new life while their old one crumbles tragically behind them. Yet there's little passion in Link's ponderous white elephant of a movie, which preens with handsome production values, but refuses to clutter its pretty African vistas with the grit of real human emotion. Much like its obvious antecedent, the overlong and inertly pictorial Out Of Africa, the film has been fashioned as the perfect Oscar bait, giving off the air of great importance but none of the weight. In a questionable shift of perspective, Link (Beyond Silence) alters the child's-eye view of Zweig's book by focusing more on a young marriage that's thrown out of balance when it moves from upper-class parlor rooms to the open savanna. Sensing the devastating changes to come in his homeland, Merab Ninidze arranges to manage the farm of a British colonial in 1938 Kenya, where he summons his reluctant wife (Juliane Köhler) and open-minded daughter, played as a child by Lea Kurka and as a teenager by Karoline Eckertz. Convinced that their stay in Africa will only be temporary, Köhler refuses to unpack the good china, but otherwise tries to impose the bourgeois comforts of home on their modest one-room abode. Not nearly so set in her ways, Köhler's daughter makes the transition more smoothly, befriending their loyal and sweet-natured Kenyan cook (Sidede Onyulo) and quickly picking up the language. As the war drags on and news from home gets increasingly grim, Köhler learns to embrace her new surroundings, but the marriage falls out of sync again as Ninidze makes plans for a judgeship in postwar Germany. Even at a leisurely 141 minutes, Nowhere In Africa takes on more subplots and minor characters than it can handle, including the couple's ambiguous friendship with a fellow German émigré (Matthias Habich), Köhler's affair with a British officer, and the daughter's budding romance with an African boy. The film's only resonant relationship is the simple, touching connection between the little girl and the saintly cook, but even that is marred by Nowhere In Africa's disturbingly paternal attitude toward the native Kenyans, which has more than a little in common with the colonialists. With sumptuous widescreen photography and a pounding world-music score, The film makes for an absorbing travelogue at best, as pretty as a picture book and just as flat on the surface.