It won lots of Oscars. The scenery is great -- somehow in 1985 they managed to make Africa look like 1916.
But the movie was only a B+ effort. The story was optioned several times and scripts were written several times, but nobody ever brought it to screen before Sydney Pollack. The problem is, the novel/memoir was written many years after Blixen left Africa, and it's not a chronological story. It's a series of vignettes, a series of essays, with no narrative thread. In places it's very poetic, impressionistic, like a prose poem.
In order to make a movie out of it, Pollack and his screen writer pretty much invented the story, using details of Blixen's real life. The movie is accurate, in depicting what life was like for white European colonialists taking up residence in Africa before the Great War, but everything else is made up.
Although they did use some real-life props. The biplane used is the exact same model (there were six of them remaining in the whole world), and the compass which is a central point in the plot is the actual compass given to Blixen by Denys.
What one takes away from the movie, after all is said and done, is the 'nativism' process whereby Blixen, who arrives in full Edwardian splendor toting china, silver, fine cabinets and rugs, gradually adopts her new country and begins living simply, with the land, with no sense of urgency or need to control her surroundings. It's a valuable lesson in the artificiality of Western values, and the quiet joy to be found in appreciating the wonders of the world as it is.
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