The souls of Streep

The following post is the last in a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

In the 2009 movie Julie & Julia, Amy Adams is Julie Powell, a young arrival in 2002 Queens who decides to launch a blog in which she writes about preparing all 524 of Julia Child’s 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. Her story alternates with that of Streep as Child in the 1950s, and the series of events that culminate in the publication of that book. Julie Powell is pleased by the increasingly positive attention she gets for her work, which will result in her own book (and, eventually, a movie). But toward the end of the film she learns from a reporter that Julia Child herself is contemptuous and dismissive Powell, though we never learn exactly what she said or even whether Child actually ever read her blog. Julie is crushed to conclude that the will not only never meet her now 90 year-old inspiration, but will never get her approval, either. “The one in your head is the one that matters,” her husband consoles her.

As someone who has spent time writing about famous people he’s never met, I’ll confess that this scene had some personal resonance for me. Analyzing the careers of celebrities evokes a range of emotions, among them admiration, longing, distaste, and shame (can’t you generate your own material rather than relying on somebody else’s?). Notwithstanding the rejection I’ve experienced, and the fear of it that has prevented me from pursuing the people I’ve been writing about in this book, I have nevertheless soldiered on in the belief that it’s the work—their work, and the work I’ve done to build on it in this modest way—that finally matters, if for no other reason than keeping me out of any number of forms of trouble. There are, after all, worse ways of spending time than in the virtual company of movie stars.

But one of the things I’ve learned from Meryl Streep is that her work is not finally about her, or about me. Instead, it’s really about other people. The great paradox of actors is that by embodying fictive people they enliven real ones. In her 1998 appearance on the TV program Inside the Actor’s Studio, Streep explained this with spontaneity that’s worth quoting at some length:

I was thinking about applying to law school and thinking that acting is a stupid way to make a living, that it doesn’t do any good in the world. But I think it does, I think it does, there’s a great worth in it. And the worth is in listening to people who maybe don’t even exist or who are voices in your past and through you come through the work and you give them to other people. I think that giving voice to characters who have no other voice is the great worth of what we do. So much of acting is vanity. I mean, this [appearing on the show] feels so great to come here and sit here and have everybody clap. But the real thing that makes me feel so good is when I know I’ve said something for a soul, when I’ve presented a soul.

            In terms of the overarching argument that frames this book, I would describe Meryl Streep’s historiographic vision as that of a progressive feminist. I say that because the arc, the non-straight but clear line that runs through her work, is one in which the lives of women have gradually improved.  They get more power over control of the terms in their lives, power that begins at home but eventually moves outside the home. That power has precedents in the past in the lives of those who illuminated the way, but most of it is something whose emergence she charts in the history of our time. To a great degree, this realized dream is a substantively American one, grounded in aspirations that transcend gender. But realized dreams are also surprisingly complicated ones, with unexpected consequences, ambiguities, and unfinished work.

As her comments also suggest, Streep’s historiographic vision has a powerful moral component, and a belief in a living connection that binds people across time and space that she describes in terms of the transcendent term “soul.” Sister Aloysius would probably not approve of this use of the word. But Streep blessed her anyway.

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Habit of authority

After a string of light roles, Streep became a prying nun -- and took her vision of feminism to a new level


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

Most of Streep's movies in the last decade amount to liberal feminist fantasies, in that the women in question have remunerative, prestigious, and emotionally rewarding careers. This is also true of Julie & Julia, which projects such a vision back in time, depicting the happily married Julia Child’s successful quest to find a professional calling (though grieves at her inability to bear a child). In an interesting variation on this idea, Streep plays a wealthy woman with no obvious paid employment but who works as a patron of the arts and as a mentor to a troubled Chinese astronomy graduate student in the little-seen Dark Matter (2008), whose release was delayed by a year because its plot resembled the circumstances surrounding the Virginia Tech shootings of 2007. 

It’s in this context that Streep’s performance as Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the authoritarian nun of Doubt (2008) is so important. John Patrick Shanley wrote and directed this adaptation of his 2004 play about a 1960s priest (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who may or may not be a pedophile, the principal of the parochial school (Streep) who’s convinced that he is, and the young nun (Amy Adams, who appeared with Streep in Julie & Julia) who’s unsure. Shanley’s exquisitely calibrated screenplay is constructed in such a way that it’s impossible to say with any certainty whether Sister Aloysius’s conduct in her pursuit of the priest, which is both intense and ethically ambiguous, is justified. For our purposes, what matters is that we’re dealing with a working-class woman—something we know solely on the basis of her thick Bronx accent—who holds an important job that’s not merely a career, but a vocation. She wields real power, and does so through a series of techniques that include intimidation, passive-aggressive behavior, and a supple command of bureaucratic machinery.  Sister Aloysius is thus a walking illustration of the maxim that it’s women, not men, who actually run the Roman Catholic Church.

Run, but not rule. As she herself states plainly early in the movie, the man she suspects is her superior. She regards his boss as incompetent at best, and suspects his former one is covering for him. To make matters worse, the mother (Viola Davis) of the African American child (Joseph Foster) that Sister Alyosius fears is a victim of the priest believes that even if the allegations are true, this form of abuse is a balm given the physical abuse he endures at the hands of his father, at a school that represents real opportunity for the boy’s future. Sister Aloysius then resorts to great cunning by fabricating a conversation with another nun, and blackmailing the priest into resigning. (Naturally, he’s kicked upstairs.)

It is possible to finish watching Doubt and conclude that in overstepping her occupational boundaries, ignoring the wishes of a mother who believes she is acting in her child’s best interests, and committing what she herself considers a mortal sin, Sister Aloysius is guilty of creating a deeply tragic outcome. This is all the more so given that for most of the movie, the evidence for her suspicions against the priest amount to little more than an observation that he fails to trim his fingernails. But it’s not credibly possible to finish watching Doubt and fail to see that Sister Aloysius is a deeply committed woman who is willing to make grave personal sacrifices in order to do what she believes is right. Nor, given the recent history of the Church, is it possible not to see real prescience on the part of a woman who tried to prevent a great moral evil that was perpetrated by generations of men who failed to exercise their unchecked authority in a responsible matter. Meryl Streep’s feminist vision is bigger than that of wealthy white women who want a well-appointed home, regular orgasms, and glamorous careers. It’s one in which all women, and thus all men, have a stake.

Next: the final installment in the Streep series -- and the "Sensing the Past" series

'Hours' of 'Adaptation'

In 2002, Streep embarked on a stretch of remarkable creativity and productivity with a pair of innovative projects


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

Though Dancing and Lughnasa and Music of the Heart represent important statements in the evolution of Streep’s cinematic feminism, both were small independent films with miniscule grosses compared with big-budget behemoths of the time like Armageddon (1998) or the The Matrix (1999). Moreover, Music of the Heart was followed by the longest interregnum in Streep’s career: it would be three full years before she appeared in a starring role. (She did have a voice cameo as a blue fairy in Steven Spielberg’s completion of the posthumous Stanley Kubric project A.I. [Articifical Intelligence] in 2001.) Streep’s youngest children were nine and thirteen in 2000, which may have played a role in this slowed output. They probably also played a role in her subsequent decisions to appear in small roles as the comically hapless Aunt Josephine in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) and to provide the imperious voice of the Ant Queen in The Ant Bully (2006). She also had a very funny cameo as herself—as a not very good actress—in the sublimely silly Farrelly Brothers film Stuck on You (2003).

But what might be termed the Meryl Streep renaissance—one defined not in talent but in terms of her artistic profile—began at the end of 2002 with her appearance in two other movies, both involving the portrayal of literary figures. The first of these, Adaptation, is a singular work in Streep’s corpus. Adaptation represented a collaboration between two of the most inventive figures in modern Hollywood: screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. The two teamed up in 1999 for the weirdly brilliant Being John Malkovich, in which a series of characters manage to enter a portal in the famed actor’s brain and experience reality through his eyes. Adaptation, which is about Kauffman’s difficulty in trying to adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s 1998 non-fiction book The Orchid Thief for the big screen, actually begins with scenes on the set of Being John Malkovich. It also involves Kaufman’s relationship with his socially tone deaf twin brother Donald, who decides he, too, wants to write a screenplay—and does so successfully even as Charlie struggles. Ultimately the two brothers would get the writing credit for Adaptation, and be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But Donald Kaufman is not actually a real person; for the first time in history, a wholly fictional, as opposed to pseudonymous, character was nominated for an Oscar (the award went to Richard Harwood for The Pianist).

Adaptation has a wonderful star-studded cast that includes Nicolas Cage as both Kaufmans; Chris Cooper, who won a supporting actor Academy Award for his portrayal of the actual Orchid Thief; and Brian Cox as the real life Robert McKee, the famed screenwriting teacher to whom both Kaufman brothers turn for help with their respective projects. Streep plays Orlean—or some facsimile of the actual person. Actually, it becomes increasingly clear as the story proceeds that Charlie Kaufman’s obsession with Orlean makes the portrayal of her that we see on screen increasingly suspect. For much of the movie, she’s a consummate professional, an intimidatingly competent member of the New York literati. Which is entirely credible. But Kaufman starts playing with her, incongruously scripting a sexual relationship with the repellent, if amusing, thief. (There’s a hilarious sequence of her getting high crushed orchid dust.) Indeed, her murderous behavior toward the end of the movie seems to come out of nowhere, its jarring character very much the point of the film’s postmodern sensibility. The meta-textual zaniness of Adaptation, the desire on a viewer’s part to see just how this crazy story will play out, gives it a freshness that’s extremely rare in mainstream Hollywood moviemaking (another Sony Pictures production, it was distributed by Columbia). And it’s especially refreshing to see Streep, a true blue-chip figure in the industry, lend her talents to such a project and take them to an entirely new level.

The same month Adaptation was appeared, Streep’s other film of 2002, The Hours, was also released. Though less so than Adaptation, The Hours, which David Hare adapted from Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel, has a literary/experimental air, which takes the form of a tripartite structure of single days in the lives of three women whose stories only converge at the end of the movie. One narrative involves Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman, wearing a now legendary prosthetic nose), struggling with depression as she begins to conceive her 1925 masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway (originally titled “The Hours”). Another involves Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a 1950s housewife and mother of a young son in Los Angeles who is fighting off suicidal impulses, in part by reading Mrs. Dalloway. The third involves Clarissa Vaughn (Streep) a bisexual New York book editor in 2001 nursing a beloved old gay poet/novelist friend (Ed Harris) through the ravages of AIDS on the day in which she plans to throw him a party—plot elements that allude to Mrs. Dalloway, which is his nickname for Clarissa. He’s written a famous novel that features a thinly fictionalized version of his friend.

I regard Clarissa Vaughn as Streep’s most fully realized creation. She’s a devoted friend of Harris’s character; lover of a woman played Allison Janney; mother of a college-age daughter played by Claire Danes; and a literary professional who midwives writing into publication. This last role is more hinted at by devices like manuscripts on her desk than actually depicted. But love and work, art and life, are so thoroughly fused that it seems misguided to insist on isolating the strands.

Which is not to say that Clarissa is a flawless person. She tends to live in the past, haunted by a romance with the poet that foundered on the vine of their youth. This is more than a strictly interior foible; it leads her to subtly neglect her relationship with Janney’s character, with whom Streep does some marvelously nuanced acting. Their alienation is subtle but palpable, conveyed most vividly in a scene in which they talk to each other from different rooms. Streep’s eyes betray impatience, and her voice is ever-so clipped in responding to Janney, who manages to inflect a slight air of aggrievement that seems justified, at least on the basis of the errands she’s running on behalf of a man she rightly senses is a rival with whom she cannot compete. Clarissa’s daughter is also impatient her mother’s lingering obsession with her former flame.  

Streep’s Clarissa is the only major character of The Hours who can be said to achieve anything resembling a happy ending, though it takes a suicide, one of two in the movie, for her to finally come to her senses, signaled by the great tenderness with which she gazes into Janney’s eyes at the end of the story. In large measure, that happiness can be viewed as a matter of historical circumstance: as a woman of the 21^st century, Clarissa has the capacity to achieve an integrated life of the kind that Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown can only dream of (albeit as very privileged people in terms of their class status). But having such a capacity is not synonymous with achieving it, and for Clarissa it’s a near thing. Michael Cunningham and David Hare created this character; Stephen Daldry, most of whose prior work was for the stage, directed it. But Meryl Streep is the figure who brings this Clarissa most fully to life, with a voice and gestures that are experienced as a gift.

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Next: Streep as villain.

Enlightening bitch

In the last decade, Streep has played some marvelously unpleasant women


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

  

With Eleanor Prentiss Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate (2004), Streep launched the first of a string of politicians she would play. This remake of the 1962 classic, directed by Jonathan Demme, was updated in a series of ways, among them giving the famous Frank Sinatra role to an African American (Denzel Washington); moving the key war scene in the movie from Korea to Kuwait; and making the source of the conspiracy not international Marxism, but rather an ominous weapons manufacturer by the name of Manchurian Global. One key renovation, though, is in the role originated by Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Eleanor Iselin, the manipulative wife of the buffoonish, McCarthyesque Senator Johnny Iselin (James Gregory). This character is also the mother, from a previous marriage, of war hero Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who she wants to be a vice-presidential nominee. The 2004 version of the movie drops the husband and makes Streep the senator, with her son Raymond (Liev Shreiber) as a member of the House of Representatives.

Lansbury, who seems as genial in real life as she does vicious in the movie, did a fine job in the 1962 version. But Streep’s Mrs. Shaw is a dazzling embodiment of evil incarnate. She makes a stemwinding speech on behalf of her son’s reluctant candidacy with a group of party insiders that alternates charm, sarcasm, and motivational brimstone. The studied polish of Streep’s delivery subtly calls attention to itself, cueing the viewer that Shaw is truly dangerous. She describes her son’s rival (Jon Voigt, who’s usually the one to play bad guys) as “a one-worlder who believes that human beings are essentially goooood and that our power is somehow, I don’t know, SHAMEFUL, or evil, or never to be used” (the sarcastic “good” and shouted “shameful” are everything here). Her coquettish interactions with her son early in the movie alternate with bullying throughout, culminating in a scene with decidedly incestuous overtones. Eleanor Prentiss Shaw is no sane person’s idea of a role model, female or otherwise. But the raw power she demonstrates in public and private should give pause to anyone who might question the potential of women in politics, a potential that must be for harm if it ever can be for good.

Streep offered an even richer portrait of a powerful, unpleasant woman in what will surely go down as one of her signature roles as Miranda Priestley, the boss-from-hell magazine editor of The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Devil is based on the 2003 novel by Lauren Weisberger. A roman a clef about her days working for the legendarily impossible Anna Wintour of Vogue, Weisberger’s book is a chronicle of the way Baby Boomers, in particular female professional Baby Boomers, oppress their successors. (“I hoped, as I usually did when she cut me off midsentence, that one day the cell phone would simply clamp down on her perfectly manicured fingers and swallow them whole, taking special time to shred those flawless red nails,” she fantasizes at one point.) We certainly see plenty of situations where Streep’s Miranda exercises a casual brutality, evident nowhere so arrogantly in a rapid-fire sequence of her repeatedly tossing her fur coat on the desk of her assistant Andrea (Anne Hathaway). Her icily delivered “That’s all,” which does come from the novel, becomes a signature line of the movie.

But the film version differs crucially from the novel in the locus of its (generational) sympathy. To a great degree, this is the result of Aline Brush McKenna’s screenplay, which renders a much more three-dimensional portrait of Miranda, including glimpses of a marriage where she certainly does not rule the roost, and a power struggle over control of the magazine. “I thought it was written out of anger,” Streep said of the novel, “and from a point of view that seemed to me very apparent. The girl seemed not to have an understanding of the larger machine to which she had apprenticed. So she was whining about getting coffee for people. If you keep your eyes open, you'll learn a lot.” Thus there’s a memorable moment when Hathaway’s character cannot stifle a giggle over the seeming inanity over a decision between belts in two shades of blue, whereupon Miranda delivers an impromptu lecture demonstrating the way the leaders of a multibillion dollar industry make decisions about such colors—“cerulean,” she clarifies—shape the behavior of her assistant in ways she’s completely oblivious.

Streep herself adds a lot to this role. Her expertly modulated voice—which, unlike the Miranda of the novel, she never raises—is key. There’s also a fine scene where she appears without makeup in a hotel room, her vulnerability as apparent as her defiance. We find ourselves rooting for Miranda despite her evident excesses. Which makes the movie a feminist triumph, in that we recognize, as we’ve always done in the case of men, that a leader need not be perfect or fair to nevertheless attract respect and even admiration.

Streep gave yet another portrait of a powerful, morally ambiguous figure in Rendition (2007), in which she plays a shadowy intelligence official with decidedly Dick Cheneyesque politics. In the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Egypt, she decides to abduct and secretly send an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen (Omar Metwally) back to his native country for interrogation, where he can be tortured without regard to the U.S. Constitution. His wife (Reese Witherspoon) desperately turns to an old Washington-based friend (Peter Sarsgaard) for help, who in turn pursues Streep’s character on the matter. But he’s out of her league. “Honey, this is a nasty business,” she tells him, her condescension wrapped in a smooth Southern accent. (Note the sexist gender reversal.) She proceeds to describe a situation where thousands of Londoners are alive because of intelligence work prevented the deaths of thousands of people. “I got grandkids in London,” she tells him, so I’m glad I’m doing this job—and you’re not.” He persists, but gets nowhere. “You sleep well now,” she says, walking away. The politics of Rendition are clearly left-wing; the man’s detention is based on suspicions that are both inaccurate and morally repugnant. But the portrait of Streep’s character is no caricature. Nor, conversely, is her character in the otherwise forgettable Robert Redford stilted gabfest Lions for Lambs (2007), in which she plays a broadcast journalist questioning the military strategy of a glib but charismatic senator played by Tom Cruise (who does approach caricature).

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Next: Streep lite -- and Streep in a habit.

 

Woman at work

Some of Streep's feminism in the 1980s integrated public and private life.


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

There were some Streep projects of the 1980s in which the non-gendered aspects of her characters life were truly important. In Plenty (1985), based on the David Hare play, she is Susan Traherne, a British woman whose small but dramatic role in the French Resistance during World War II, depicted in the opening sequence, makes everything that happens in her life subsequently pale by comparison. We see her in a number of jobs, among them a “good” one in advertising, whose mindlessness infuriates her. Traherne has a tryst with another operative (Sam Neill) early in her life, from which she never recovers, subsequently marrying a diplomat (Charles Dance) whom she treats with indifference that sometimes crosses the line into cruelty. The same can be said of a prior relationship with a young working-class man (Sting) with whom she seeks to father a child without attachments.

In the context of her career, Plenty is a fascinating experiment for Streep: she plays a stunningly unpleasant character. There’s an excruciating dinner-party scene in which Traherne manages to make us sorry for a stuffy senior Foreign Office operative (John Gielgud) grieving over British ineptitude in the Suez crisis. Streep’s capacity to incite anger in viewers usefully poses questions about the standards, gendered and otherwise, by which we judge people, something she would do repeatedly over the course of her career.

Streep did make a couple movies in which the synthesis of public and private feminism was far more successful from both an ideological as well as artistic standpoint. The best example is Silkwood (1983), the first of a series of collaborations with director Mike Nichols, screenplay by Ephron and Alice Arlen. Streep is Karen Silkwood, the real-life metallurgy worker at a nuclear power plant in Oklahoma. Divorced with children who live with their father, Silkwood shares a house with two co-workers, her lover (Kurt Russell) and a lesbian friend (Cher).  The rhythms of their everyday life, both in terms of casual humor and domestic tensions, seems more authentic and contemporary than that of The Deer Hunter. “If anything that’s the thing I’m most proud of in this movie, it’s that it accurately depicts the work force and how people keep their sense of humor no matter how bad things get,” Streep said in 1983.

 She plays Silkwood with a low-grade anti-authoritarian attitude, rendering her as an appealingly profane, pot-smoking good-ol’-girl who at one point flashes her breast on the job as a riposte to some heckling men. That anti-authoritarian disposition hardens as she gradually comes to realize that inadequate safety measures endanger workers at the plant, danger that ultimately engulfs Silkwood herself. Her growing labor activism attracts attention in Washington, but at the cost of multiple personal relationships, with men and women, among them Russell, who nevertheless still loves her.

The real Karen Silkwood died in murky circumstances in a 1974 car accident, just as revelations at the plant where she worked would go public and ultimately force its closure. Some critics disliked the ambiguity of the film’s ending, which was aesthetically as well as politically unsatisfying. But Silkwood herself belongs in the pantheon of Streep characters for the fully integrated quality of her life, a truly three-dimensional feminism of the kind one rarely sees in movies.

My personal favorite example of such three-dimensionality, however, is Streep’s turn as Helen Archer, a fictional character in the 1987 film Ironweed, based on William Kennedy’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. This may seem like an odd statement, in that the movie is about a couple of homeless alcoholics in the Depression-era Albany of 1938.    (Streep is paired again with Nicholson, an impressive piece of teamwork when one considers they played a Washington DC power couple the previous year in Heartburn.) Helen, cut off from her family, is jobless and nearly hopeless. But we learn she was once a singer in concerts and on the radio. At one point she, Nicholson and a friend (Tom Waits) wander into a local saloon and chat up the bartender (Fred Gwynn), a former singer and recovering alcoholic himself. When Helen ingenuously gushes about his singing and mentions that she too once performed, he genially insists she take the stage at the back of the room and sing a tune. Helen tentatively begins a version of “He’s Me Pal,” a pop standard circa 1905, which she dedicates to Nicholson. But her performance gains in intensity—Streep’s singing talents are put to very good use here—and the room takes on a remarkable glow, even if her teeth are blackened and her clothes tattered. Helen finishes to rousing applause, and Nicholson, who had bought her a flower for her coat moments before, now comes over for a kiss. “My God, Helen, this is as good as it gets. You were born to be a star,” he tells her. “You think so?” she replies, tentative pleasure in her voice, and the two embrace, protected from view by their hats, the iconic image that became the movie’s poster.

As we’ve been suspecting, though—how is it that her voice is projecting even when she’s not in front of the microphone, and where did band accompaniment we hear come from?—it’s all been an illusion. The camera cuts to Helen finishing her song, much less impressively than imagined, to a crowd that less impressive, and less impressed, than imagined. (Her man is still waiting for her, though, and the kind bartender, ironically, buys her a drink.) It’s a beautifully heartbreaking moment in a vivid but painful movie. It also represents a rare moment of fusion in a woman’s life, where she is doing something she loves in a public setting for a man she loves, and that man is there to support and savor labors that generate positive attention from the crowd, even if not as much as we wish for her.  Helen is a tragic figure—she had explained the bartender before she sang that her Nicholson’s drinking problem had forced them to sell off her piano and other prized musical possessions—precisely because her vision of a career was not a mere illusion. Just as Nicholson’s love of her is both real and destructive.

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Next: Streep as mother.

 

The private sector

Feminism, Streep style, in the 1980s


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

Streep continued to play strong-minded women in all of her film roles of the 1980s, but the power her characters wield is largely defined in sexual terms. She landed a high-profile double role in the 1981 film The French Lieutenant’s Woman, based on the 1969 novel of the same name by John Fowles. Fowles’s book is that rare case of a commercially successful postmodern novel—only Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Antonement, also made into a (weaker) movie, was comparably successful—in which characters defy the narrator-author’s wishes in a story with multiple endings. It would not appear to be particularly promising movie material, except that it was skillfully adapted by playwright and fellow Briton Harold Pinter, who created a parallel movie-within-a-movie plot involving actors making a romantic drama set in the Victorian era. The two pairs of characters, played by Jeremy Irons and Streep, are both in love. Their different fates at least initially appear to hinge on their different historical circumstances. In one case Streep is an abandoned woman, left desolate by the unseen French lieutenant of the title, who insists on lingering as a social outcast in a seaside town until she becomes a source of growing fascination for the affianced gentleman played by Irons. In the other, her character is a privileged professional actor in metropolitan London, empowered to conduct an extramarital affair and largely dictate its conditions to the (also married) Irons. But as with the novel, the point of the movie is very much that things are not what they seem. The French lieutenant’s woman has more resources, principal among them the power to beguile, than her pursuer realizes. And while the professional woman is, in the parlance of the time “liberated,” the problems she is seen grappling with are primarily romantic, not professional. (It might have been interesting, for example, to have a scene with her arguing with her director about the portrayal of her character.) I don’t want to go overboard in emphasizing how the bottle is half-empty here: women, and the actor who portrays them, are at the center of the story. But in retrospect their compass of action seems limited, precisely because the overt tenor of the discourse is emancipatory.

The same might be said for Still of the Night (1982), in which Streep returned to the supervision of Kramer vs. Kramer director Robert Benton in an overt work of homage to Alfred Hitchcock. Here Streep is a blue-blooded femme fatale named Brooke Reynolds, who may or may not have anything to do with the murder of a man who was undergoing psychoanalysis at the time of his death. Roy Scheider is the therapist who finds himself drawn against his better judgment to Reynolds, who works at an East Side auction house. The film is competent but boring, in large measure because Streep and Scheider are lacking in chemistry.

Even more boring is Streep’s 1984 film Falling in Love, much-ballyhooed at the time of its release, because it marked a reunion with De Niro. This time the two play married Westchester suburbanites who fall in love courtesy of the Metro North commuter railroad, despite their better judgment. De Niro is a construction executive, and we see him at work repeatedly. Streep does a little freelance artwork on the side, but is otherwise a housewife without children. This is one of those movies that make you impatient for the lovers to hurry the hell up and overcome the tedious obstacles that stand in the way of their inevitable triumph. Were it made ten or fifteen years later, a divorced Streep would start a business involving chocolate chip cookies or some other form of home economics, which would provide the perfect way for the lovers to accidentally run into each other at a strip mall. For now, they have to settle for Rizzoli’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue (seeing that got me pining for a long lost love).

In Heartburn (1986), Streep for the first time of many subsequent times tackles playing a real person, in this case journalist, later turned writer/director, Nora Ephron. (“It’s a little depressing to know that if you go to an audition to play yourself, you would lose to Meryl,” she later joked.) The film, directed by Mike Nichols, is based on the 1983 roman a clef of the same name, which chronicles the rise and fall of Ephron’s marriage to Washington Post writer Carl Bernstein, played by Jack Nicholson. It’s refreshing to note that we do see Streep’s character in workplace settings, unlike her husband, known to the world for his role in breaking the Watergate story. Not surprisingly, that working style is more fluid—the personal and professional aspects of her life are apparent both in showing up for meetings pregnant, and in her warm relationship with her younger boss, played by Jeff Daniels. Moreover, Ephron makes the bold choice of making the resolution of the story her decision to leave Bernstein for his infidelity without another man waiting in the wings, a clear breach with the normal logic of romantic storytelling.  Such an approach makes real demands of an audience, even a predominately female audience, and the pitch for its protagonist’s sympathy is further strained by the obvious elite status of a woman who can literally afford to be divorced, even with children. No doubt about it: this is a feminist movie. But it is decisively feminism of the private sector.

What’s striking about the pattern I’m describing is the way in which even a movie that seems a world away—1985 Best Picture Out of Africa, set in colonial Kenya—turns out to be pretty much the same old story. Writer/director Sydney Pollack (1934-2008) was a true Hollywood professional, and Africa is, from a visual standpoint, simply gorgeous. But its racial politics amount to little more than a postcard for imperialism, and its gender politics are also finally retrograde. Streep again plays a real person, Danish writer Karen Blixen, later known to the world by her pen name, Isak Dinesen (1885-1962). From the start, we see her as a maverick figure. During a frigid European hunting expedition, she proposes a marriage of convenience with a friend, Baron von Blixen-Finecke (an amiable Klaus Brandauer), whereby the two will start a diary farm in Kenya, which turns out to be a coffee plantation because he changes his mind without telling her. Mrs. Blixen arrives in Kenya and blithely walks into a men’s-only private club, causing a stir. (Naturally, they’ll collectively stand her a drink by the time the movie is over.)  She also takes a strong hand in running the plantation, not only because her husband would rather go hunting, but also because that’s the kind of woman she is, a woman who, when her husband sends word to send supplies to himself and British soldiers fighting the Germans in East Africa in the First World War, insists trekking across dangerous terrain and delivering them in person (with a retinue, of course).

But none of this, or even a Blixen writing career we know about chiefly through the flashback voiceover device that frames the film, can compete with the romantic charms of Robert Redford, who plays her lover Briton Denys Finch Hatton with an incongruous American accent. Redford is admittedly a powerful draw, but their relationship—she pining away while he repeatedly takes off—puts the film in very familiar grooves. Blixen does finally take a hard line with Finch Hatton, but we never really learn the outcome of such militancy, because he dies before their relationship is resolved. There are any number of possible reasons why the edgy or simply novel aspects of the story get swallowed by conventional romance; a desire to sell lots of tickets to a 1980s mainstream audience was surely prominent among them. But such big, bloated and bland moviemaking is exactly the kind of cinema that has given Hollywood films of the 1980s something of a benighted critical reputation, would later help spark the leaner, edgier independent movement of the 1990s (in which, as we’ll see, Streep would participate).

Next: Streep's (smaller) body of public sector feminism

Bending with gender

In three 1979 films, Streep made the most of limited material 


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

The Deer Hunter put Streep on the map as a new force for women in cinema. In her next two movies, Manhattan and The Seduction of Joe Tynan (both 1979), Streep played professional women, a writer and a politico respectively. Significantly, however, they were women whose careers were secondary in terms of their function in these movies, which turned on their sexual relationships with men. In Manhattan is a fabled work in Woody Allen’s writing/directing career, but one whose May-December romance with the high school student played by Mariel Hemingway would never fly in terms of contemporary mores, even without the later controversy surrounding Allen’s relationship with his adoptive stepdaughter. Streep plays his ex-wife, Jill, who now has a lesbian lover and is writing a tell-all about her marriage with Allen’s character, Isaac Davis. (“Look at you, you’re so threatened,” she says amusedly to Isaac, even as we know he is right to be.) A walking stereotype of the feminist as castrating bitch, the character as written is so over-the-top as to amount to misogyny, even making allowances for comic license and the fact that Allen’s purported attempt to run over Jill’s lover in his car becomes a bit of a running joke. But Streep, who plays Jill straight, endows her with an unselfconscious confidence and intensity that makes her seem alive, and, amazingly enough, almost appealing. Yet the character, who only has two scenes in the movie, is defined in terms of being a foil for Allen’s persona, right down to her literary career, which consists of turning her personal life into commerce in the form of a book with the title Marriage, Love and Divorce.

Streep’s character is the creature of a decidedly less severe stripe in writer/actor Alan Alda’s The Seduction of Joe Tynan, in which she plays Karen Traynor, the daughter of a Southern political fixer who becomes one in her own right. Alda plays the title character, a married U.S. senator from New York drawn by the siren song of national office—and, of course, the charms of his hired female gun. In the 1970s, Alda was lionized as the quintessential modern man of the feminist era—a thinking woman’s man. The Seduction of Joe Tynan suggests that Alda’s vanity got the better of him, both in his unwillingness to play the bad guy (something Robert Redford was more willing to do in The Candidate, a similar movie released in 1972), or to make Streep’s character much more than a (professional) woman in love. The Seduction of Joe Tynan proved to be a forgettable movie, and a mere stepping-stone for Streep.

Far more important was her third film of 1979, Kramer vs. Kramer, for which she won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. (It’s a bit odd, yet a sign of the times, that Streep got a supporting Oscar for a title role.) In terms of gender politics, Streep’s role as Joanna Kramer is a tough sell, as she plays an emotionally distraught woman who leaves her husband and son to go off and find herself. The rhetorical deck was also a bit stacked against the character. In part, that’s because the source material for the movie, Avery Corman’s 1977 novel, has a distinctly male point of view. (“Feminists will applaud me,” his Joanna declares when she leaves her husband at their New York apartment, in stilted dialogue that characterizes the book.)  In part, it’s also because Streep’s co-star, Dustin Hoffman, was, to put it mildly, a strong-minded actor with figurative weight he wasn’t afraid to throw around. But Streep, who was married and had her first child by 1979, took the part as a matter of conviction, determined to make a case for Joanna as a woman who loved her child but who was in too much personal anguish to continue without respite. “I think that if there’s anything that runs through all my work, all my characters, it’s that I have a relationship with them where I feel I have to defend them,” she said of her feelings for the character.

In addition to her acting, Streep made her case for Joanna Kramer by arguing for changes in the script, successfully persuading director Robert Benton to rewrite her courtroom testimony for custody of the couple’s son toward the end of the film. In particular, she added a key line responding to assertions that Ted Kramer had been the primary parent for the couple’s child for eighteen months by noting that Joanna had been so for five and a half years. “We listened,” Benton later explained. “And she became the real Mrs. Kramer.”

But the real Mrs. Kramer remains, first and foremost, a mother. In the book, her aspirations for career, which turn out to involve working as a clerk for Hertz, becomes a source of bitter humor: “She left her family, her child, to go to California to rent cars,” Joanna’s own mother notes incredulously to Ted. In the movie, Joanna testifies that she’s a sportswear designer. But while Ted’s career in advertising is central to the course of the movie, this passing mention is all we hear about Joanna’s. Any work outside the home is incidental.

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Next: Streep in the '80s.

 

"Deer" Meryl

Streep provided crucial ballast for the male-dominated Deer Hunter


The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

Though, as I’ve indicated, Meryl Streep underwent a long and rigorous apprenticeship, and did some relatively high-profile television and film work in the late seventies, the movie that turned her into an “overnight sensation” in 1978 was The Deer Hunter. In part, that’s because The Deer Hunter, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture, was a sensation in its own right, and became a Hollywood legend for a whole host of reasons. One was that its success led United Artists to give director Michael Cimino broad license for his next film, Heaven’s Gate (1978), whose colossal cost overruns helped plunge the studio into bankruptcy. Another was that it was the among the first major Hollywood films to deal with the Vietnam War, and included a notorious plot line involving Russian Roulette as a betting game among the Vietnamese. A third was its extraordinarily gifted cast—which included Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and Streep’s fiancé John Cazale, in the final appearance of his brief but brilliant career—that defined the movie as a generational turning point for a new generation of actors.

The Deer Hunter follows the lives of a group of friends (De Niro, Walken, and John Savage) from a small Pennsylvania steel town to The Horror of the Vietnam war, from which only De Niro’s character returns home anything resembling intact. The film combines a gritty working-class feel along with action sequences that rival anything from the Francis Ford Coppola school of filmmaking (Coppola, of course, would weigh in with Apocalypse Now the following year). In their phallic bravado, both movies seem dated; the extended wedding reception sequence in The Deer Hunter was much celebrated at the time as a vivid, almost anthropological, slice of working-class life, but for my taste its sweaty Eastern-European vivacity, complete with a SERVING GOD AND COUNTRY banner looming behind the dancing partygoers, verges on condescension.

Streep’s character, a supermarket checkout girl named Linda, provides crucial ballast for this male-dominated cast. We first see her on the morning of the wedding, in a gaudy pink bridesmaid’s dress, making breakfast for her alcoholic father. When she brings it to him, he assaults her. But Linda is not a passive victim. When we next see her, it’s at the bungalow her boyfriend Nick (Walken) shares with his buddy Michael (De Niro). She asks Nick if she can stay in their place while the two are in the army, and states she wants to pay them. We don’t quite know what happens—we see the action through an interior window, and Nick seems to be remonstrating at the very idea of her paying—but we get the idea that Streep’s quiet, willowy persona notwithstanding, she’s got a spine.

Michael, we figure out quickly, has a soft spot for Linda. But he’s not going to steal his buddy’s girlfriend. Even after he returns from Vietnam—Nick, badly psychologically damaged during a stint as a prisoner of war, insists on staying behind to become a professional Russian Roulette player—he’s reluctant to take up with Linda. Linda, however, shows interest in taking up with him, which becomes an unresolved subplot in the movie.

In her scenes with De Niro (the two would team up again for Falling in Love in 1984 and Marvin’s Room in 1996), Streep deploys a become facial tactic that would become a standard part of her thespian repertoire: looking directly at her acting partner, then turning her head away, her eyes cast down, sometimes rolling her eyes as she does so in moments of levity or irony (we viewers are ever-so-briefly in on the joke). What’s really quite striking about this technique is that it manages to convey shyness and assertiveness simultaneously—feminine feminism, as it were. This delicate balance goes to the heart of her performance in The Deer Hunter, where she is largely at the mercy of events beyond her control, but still manages to quietly express herself in ways that are both moving and life-affirming in the face of death, literal or psychological. It’s not entirely clear whether Linda’s feelings for Michael are for him in their own right, or whether he’s simply a living connection to Nick and a sense of possibility the war seems to have wrecked. But she knows what she wants. “Why don’t we go bed,” she says to Michael shortly after his return. “Can’t we just comfort each other?” (Streep recites the line as a statement, not a question.) Michael demurs, but the next thing we see is Linda in his cheap motel room, undressed, climbing into bed with him (“feels kinda weird!” she says, looking into the bathroom mirror before she does so). But Linda finds the fully clothed Michael asleep on top of the sheets. She nevertheless crawls under them and lies beside him, taking uneasy comfort in his presence. That sense of uneasy comfort culminates in the final scene of the movie, where in a group middle shot, Linda leads the group in singing “God Bless America,” she and Michael looking at each other, but rarely at the same time. Love and pain, public and private, are intertwined. Feeling both is an act of will, and a prerequisite for hope.

Streep critiques

Fair or unfair, not everyone has liked Meryl Streep's acting

The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

Streep has always had her critics, and they have come in a variety of forms. Some of this has criticism has been the result of Streep’s early uneasiness with her peers, a problem that dogged her throughout her high school, college, and graduate education. In her first year at Yale one of her teachers placed her on a form of academic probation because he believed, as she later recalled, “that I was holding back my talent out of fear with competing with my fellow students.” Streep was hurt by this, but admitted it was true. Such problems became less obvious with the passage of time, but it’s hard to believe they disappeared entirely in a business as competitive as Hollywood. Streep herself has sometimes come out on the losing end of such contests, most notably in the case of the title role in the 1995 film Evita, for which she underwent considerable preparation. “I can sing better than Madonna,” she said at the time. “If she gets it, I'll rip her throat out.”

Streep has also had critics who have been less than enchanted by her style of acting. She can hardly be faulted on her technique, and her mastery of voices and accents – she learned Polish as part of her work in her Oscar winning performance in Sophie’s Choice, used a Danish accent for Out of Africa, and has spoken the Queen’s English in roles that ranged from the Victorian servant of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981 to Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady thirty years later – are simply dazzling. But to some that’s precisely the problem: her acting calls attention to itself. Katherine Hepburn told her biographer, Scott Berg, that he considered Streep among her least favorite contemporary actresses, dismissing her with this bitchy appraisal: “click, click, click.”

The best known, and most damaging, of Streep’s critics was Pauline Kael (who, as you may recall, was not particularly fond of Clint Eastwood, either, though for the opposite reason: she didn’t think he was an actor at all). Over the course of her first decade or so in movies, Kael asserted that Streep acted “only from the neck up,” speculating that “in her zeal to be an honest actress, she allows nothing to escape her conception of a performance.” Kael too could be bitchy, describing Streep as “our lady of the accents.” In 1994, three years after Kael’s retirement, Streep offered her reaction to such criticism: “It’s so awful that someone you admire hates what you do.” But still later, she was less diplomatic. “You know what I think?” she asked in 2008. “That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blonde hair, and their heartlessness got to her; then, years later, she saw me.” New York Times reviewer came to his former colleague’s defense: “Kael being quite dead, she can't address Streep's psychoanalysis, but one might also think she wouldn't have gotten far as a critic if she relentlessly avenged these theorized college slights with undeserved digs against everyone on screen with long blonde hair, a not uncommon feature for an actress. One might think it's possible to simply not like Streep's acting style.” Streep, it is clear, can also be bitchy.

Still, on balance, it’s hard not to be impressed by Streep’s overall equanimity, particularly when one learns of far more crude dismissals. In a 2008 interview with Entertainment Weekly, she related that during her audition for a leading role in King Kong (1976), a part that ultimately went to Jessica Lange, producer Dino De Laurentiis asked his son in Italian, with Streep in the room, “Why did you send me this pig? This woman is so ugly!” Steep responded in Italian, “I’m very sorry that I disappoint you.” As she explained, “He was so used to treating girls like bimbos, never imagined that a blond person could speak Italian,” she said. De Laurentiis, who died in 2010, denied describing Streep as a pig, or meeting with her about King Kong, though he does recall doing so for another movie. In her 1984 biography of Streep, journalist Diana Maychick has the actor describing a similar incident involving a different De Laurentiis project, the 1978 film King of the Gypsies, in which it is De Launentiis’s son, who died in a 1981 plane crash, who makes the disparaging remark in Italian. My guess is that the earlier version of the story is what Streep was remembering, largely because less time had passed at the time she related it. But that something like it happened – in that case, among others – is very likely. Even in the case of a high prestige project like Out of Africa, and as enlightened a director as the late Sydney Pollack, Streep felt forced to deal with comporting with traditional ideas of femininity. In a documentary on the making of the film, she described  Pollack as believing she was not sexy enough to play the part of Isak Dinesen, and wrangling with a meeting to further discuss the part. “I went, pathetically, to that meeting in a very low-cut blouse with a push-up bra. I’m really shamed to say that I did, and it worked.  That’s the really sad part.” Streep related the story lightheartedly. But the tone never entirely undercut the words. In a subsequent interview with James Lipton for Inside the Actor’s Studio, Lipton noted that he had recently interviewed Pollack, who reported no such recollection these exchanges. “I knoooow,” she replied to laughter. “He probably doesn’t remember. You know, he probably doesn’t remember that was the thing. But” – she pauses for comic effect – “that was the thing.”  
Of course, she could afford to be magnanimous. One can only wonder – no, one need not wonder at all – what less esteemed women have had to put up with in Hollywood, among many other workplaces. Streep has had about a charmed a professional life as woman could have had in the American Century, which is a way that it’s been charmed indeed, and yet to faintly damn those who have smudged the quality of that life. Even at this late date, Streep does not have a production company the way many male movie stars, among them Eastwood and Hanks, do. (Playtone, the company run by Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, was one of the producers of Mamma Mia!)  “I don’t have anybody directing my career, it just depends on what scripts come,” she said in 2010. “If I like them I do them.” Now in her sixties, she has been phenomenally productive, with dozens to her credit, among them four movies in 2007 alone.

In an important sense, Streep’s entire career has been a matter of using her talent and power to give voice to women. That career began at a propitious time; she had more opportunities that her predecessors did. But it also began in a culturally conservative one that decisively shaped Streep’s feminism.  The product of an anti-institutional moment, her statements on behalf of women took, if not anti-institutional tone, then a largely non-institutional one: the political was personal. That’s not surprising. What may be more surprising is that was only the beginning of her story.

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Next: Streep's early years as a star.

Theatrical transformation

Streep's transition from stage to screen -- to (another) screen

The following post is part of a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies.

It’s worth pausing for a moment here to note that while Streep’s ascent was rapid, it was relatively invisible for those not familiar with the intricacies of the theater world. Unlike every other figure I've been studying, she did not have an apprenticeship in television. Clint Eastwood had Rawhide, Denzel Washington had St. Elsewhere, and Tom Hanks had Bosom Buddies. Jodie Foster lacked a regular perch, but did years of yeoman’s work on a variety of shows and spent a stretch of her early career at Disney. Hanks and Washington had real stage training, but only Daniel Day-Lewis, who also did a variety of television work, underwent as long or as rigorous a preparation as Streep did. When she finally did emerge in the mass media, her impact was uniquely swift and decisive: almost overnight, she became the gold standard of acting excellence across gender lines.

Ironically, it was television, a medium where Streep has done relatively little work, which made her a household name. After landing a supporting role in the 1977 NBC movie The Deadliest Season, as the wife of a hockey player played by Michael Moriarity, Streep was cast in a leading role in Holocaust, a 1978 ABC miniseries that followed in the wake of the hugely successful Roots (1976). Streep played Inga Helms Weiss, the gentile wife of a Jewish artist (James Woods), whose prosperous family is sucked into the Nazi vortex. (Her Deadliest Season colleague Moriarity plays Erik Dorff, a jobless drifter turned Reich functionary, giving a performance of satisfying inscrutability in an otherwise drearily high-minded affair.)  Holocaust was not as successful as Roots in terms of its reception or subsequent reputation, but it premiered during the golden age of television as a mass medium, and was viewed by some 120 people, half the U.S. population. Streep, who won an Emmy for her work in the seven-part series, nevertheless correctly described her part in Holocaust as “unrelentingly noble,” and says she took it largely for the money, as her fiancé Cazale was terminally ill with cancer. Upon her return from Austria shooting the series, Streep nursed him to his death. (She began seeing, and married, Don Gummer later the same year.) Streep would return to television in 1997 as the mother of an epileptic child who insists in the face of skepticism that his condition can be improved by his diet in First, Do No Harm, for which she was also nominated for an Emmy. She won her second Emmy for her work in the 2003 HBO miniseries Angels in America, in a tour de force clutch of parts that included Ethel Rosenberg, an angel, and, most amusingly, an almost unrecognizable elderly male rabbi.

It was in movies, however, that Streep cast her lot. Her first film role was small but significant: a snarky friend of playwright Lillian Hellman in the 1977 film Julia, which starred Vanessa Redgrave in the title role and Jane Fonda as Hellman, both of whom won Oscars. Its importance is less a matter of the part itself (most of which ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor) than Julia’s status as a feminist statement. Though generically related to the “woman’s film” or “weepie” that was a staple of moviemaking in the mid-twentieth century, Julia was packaged and perceived as a sign of the new power and prestige of women in the movie business. While this would prove to a false dawn, Streep’s association with the project, directed by old-time Hollywood heavyweight Fred Zinneman, would position her as A-level talent. Fonda, twelve years Streep’s senior and a feminist trailblazer in the business, conferred her blessing: “This one will go far,” she told Zinneman.

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Next: Streep's critics

Feminist line

Meryl Streep's cinematic choices sketch a trajectory in the history of women's work.

The following post is the first in a series on Meryl Streep's vision of American history, part of a larger set of case studies. 

  I can’t say she didn’t warn me. “The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor,” Meryl Streep conceded in a 1998 interview with Interview magazine. But, she added, “it’s a completely random process. In other words, which role was available which year has more to do with who was running a studio or who was bankrolling a particular project or who the costar was.
     “The people who write about films [like person you’re now reading] always attempt to find a through line to a career,” she continued. “There is a through line to a life based on the choices you make, and so you can discern some things about an actor. But not necessarily a lot.” 
     Actually, I won’t claim to have discerned all that much. Though I’ve now spent some time in her virtual company, I don’t claim to know Meryl Streep. I will say that making allowances for the promotional persona stars adopt for pitching their work to the public—in which every project was fascinating (if challenging), every co-star was a blast, and every director was brilliant—she appears to have an truly winning personality: spontaneous, funny, self-aware.  And, allowing for typical human foibles as well as those particular to celebrities, an intriguingly normal one. “The story about Meryl Streep is that there really is no story,” Roger Ebert, who has interviewed his fair share of stars in the last half-century, wrote recently. “She is a great actress, probably the best of her generation, and has given one wonderful performance after the other. The rest of the time she is an admirable wife and mother, utterly free of gossip, scandal and even anecdote. The stories that are told about her, even the funny ones, are essentially about how gifted she is, and how much people like her. That’s it.” 
      Well, not quite. Actually, there are “through lines” to Streep’s life that are reasonably discernible. Like this one: She’s a feminist, at least in the general sense of feminism as a belief in the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. Streep is legendary for the diverse array of characters she has played: not just wives, mothers, daughters and sisters, but also clerks, journalists, teachers, and politicians. But all of them are strong characters who assert themselves in their respective environments. As does Streep herself, who has been active in any number of environmental or political causes over the years, particularly those related to related to food.
     She is a particularly acute, yet good-natured, critic of sexism in her own industry. I was amused in watching a slightly tart Streep assert in a 1993 interview assert that “actors, in general, as a general sweeping rule, are much more vain than actresses.” Deploying her vast gifts of mimicry, she then impersonated a male movie star (“they’re always checking their hair,” she says, gesturing with her hands). “I’m right, aren’t I?” she asks someone off camera, ratifying the apparent approval by saying “absolutely.” An offscreen (male) voice then asks, “And you’re not vain?” “No,” she says with mock solemnity, breaking into laughter. Still, the point remains: “I’m vain, but I’m nothing like these men.” 
     She was more pointed in a 1989 Premiere interview with Terri Minsky, who went on to have a successful television writing career. It’s worth quoting in a little detail:

“Can I just tell you [she told Minsky] that $11 million is what Jack Nicholson got for Batman. Eleven million. He was in Ironweed [with Streep herself], if you recall. Okay. All right. He was in Heartburn [also with Streep] if you remember . . . I was in Out of fucking Africa, remember? Kramer vs. fucking Kramer! The Deer Hunter.” Her voice retains its musical lit, but the passion shows in the way her pale skin begins to flush and she leans forward on her elbows. “I’m saying it’s a guy’s game. If I asked for $11 million, they would laugh. In my face. I make enough that nobody’s gonna weep on my side of the table. But it’s outrageous. I love Jack”—this is said very sweetly. “I’m happy for him. I know he’s laughing all the way to the bank when he makes these deals. But there are different rules for men than for women. I know it’s true. I’m not angry. I guess I’m angry, but not angry enough. I have a great life. If I were starving, I would be doing something about it. I’m not, obviously. And probably that plays against me in that whole negotiating process. But it stinks.”

Twenty years later, she was still fighting similar battles. There had been a time when one could plausibly claim that for all the laurels Streep had earned—among them an unprecedented 16 Academy Award nominations—the quality of her acting did not necessarily translate to box office success. But by the end of the first decade of the 21^st century, that moment had long since passed. A string of her films running from The Devil Wears Prada (2005) to It’s Complicated (2009) were major commercial winners; the 2008 hit Mamma Mia! alone generated over half a billion dollars worldwide. Streep was also increasingly working with female writers and directors, notably her longtime collaborator Nora Ephron. And yet, as she noted, she still confronted what she called “vestigial” sexism every time she made a deal. Streep got some attention in early 2009 when she observed that “Three of the nominated films [for Best Picture] this year had 26 men and one woman— Slumdog [Millionaire] and Milk, and Frost/Nixon. You know, we accept it. It’s not unusual. But we would go nuts if three of the nominated films had 26 women and one man. It would be a very, very unusual thing. We’re still not telling everybody’s story in our country and that’s where we are.”

Of course, to call Streep a feminist is not really to say all that much. Notwithstanding the difficulties some women, particularly younger ones, have with the term, the affirmation of gender parity is not an especially rare or unconventional proposition in U.S. society, at least as a matter of genteel public opinion. More specifically, Streep is a liberal feminist, which is to say that her version of feminism focuses more on notions of equality, as opposed to assertions of female power that rest more on a sense of gender difference (consider the contrast between Hillary Clinton and, say Lady Gaga in this regard). Though Streep’s versatility as an artist has always been widely noted, her persona, particularly in recent years, has had a distinctly bourgeois cast.

But this is where history comes in to the Streep equation, and the particular “through line” that I’m tracking here. Unlike the male movie stars I’ve been looking at, Streep’s work does not reveal an implicit version of the U.S. past in the vein of Clint Eastwood’s Jeffersonianism, Daniel Day-Lewis’s frontier sensibility, or Denzel Washington’s generational vision. Instead, her work documents the integration of feminist ideology into American cultural life in the transitional decades between the 20^th and 21^st century. More specifically, it documents a shift in emphasis from private life to public life. Born in 1949, she came of age after major struggles—for voting rights, abortion, pay equity, reproductive rights—had already been launched. By the time she was a young adult, many had been substantially, though not completely, achieved. Her movies show these struggles to be ongoing, as well as the ways in which life remained complicated and contested even for women who were presumably emancipated.

 So Streep’s work tells a story of the past. But is also a story in the past. She came of age in a conservative era, witnessing the failure to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1982, and a vocal antifeminist backlash on the Right, developments she tends not to address directly but ones which she addresses implicitly in her work nonetheless.

Streep’s tale of liberal feminism unfolds in three distinct stages. The first, which runs roughly the first decade of her career, is marked by characters whose self-assertion is typically played out in their private lives, particularly as wives and mothers. Then, for a brief period between the late 1980s and early 1990s, she took a series of parts that satirically comment on gender roles, part of a broader move away from drama toward comedy. Streep’s feminism shifted again at the turn of the century, this time focusing on women whose power was played out in public, institutional settings. These phases are not completely segmented, and one of the most distinctive aspects of Streep’s career is the way in which she has blended her roles. Indeed, one might say that Streep’s signal achievement as a feminist has taken the form of dramatizing the ways a woman can experience a full, if never easy, life with any number of public and private permutations—as well as the cost of not allowing this to happen. I nevertheless believe that these phases are reasonably distinct and usefully traced as such. The through line may not be entirely straight, and blurs at times. But it is one worth tracing if it allows us to see a bit more clearly how women have, and have not, changed.
  
Next: A biographical sketch.