Holiday in the Wild (2019)

Netflix's Holiday in the Wild arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is: a Kristin Davis vehicle about a woman who loses a husband and gains an elephant. The premise is not without appeal. Kate Conrad, an empty nester whose spouse announces over cocktails that he has been waiting for their son to clear out before filing, flies to Zambia alone, meets a rugged pilot played by Rob Lowe, and finds herself nursing an orphaned calf at a sanctuary. The machinery is familiar and the gears turn smoothly enough.

There is a mild current of self-actualization running beneath the romance. Kate abandoned veterinary practice years ago, and the film takes a modest pleasure in watching her reclaim it, sell the apartment, and buy a one-way ticket on her own terms. The African setting supplies a generous complement of Black supporting players, Jonathan and Aaliyah among them, who are treated as ordinary colleagues and friends. Race itself is never examined, which is a relief in one sense and an omission in another. The white heroine's fundraising drive to rescue the local sanctuary comes perilously close to the well-worn rescue narrative, and the film declines to notice.

The conservation material does the heavy lifting: poaching, orphaned elephants, a foundation's fragile budget, a fundraising campaign that saves the sanctuary at the eleventh hour. The message is real, but it arrives through incident and not through speeches. Nobody turns to the camera to explain the stakes. The resolution is a charity drive and the liquidation of personal assets, not an argument about how wealth is distributed. The film is gentler than most of its streaming peers, and for that small mercy we should be grateful. It will not change anyone's mind about anything, which may be the most honest thing about it.