Class acts

Streep's comic approach to middle-aged womanhood


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

Teachers. The next turning point in Meryl Streep’s career—the point when she began offering fully realized visions of a feminist life in which public pursuits matter at least as much as private ones—arrived with her portrayal of a pair of teachers. In a way, that’s not surprising: teaching has long been considered a job for women, in part because it’s work women have long done at home. So it was an apt fulcrum for her to tip away from women whose lives were defined more by the gender identities and into ones whose professions were central to their conception of themselves.

It’s a bit ironic, though, how this point was first illustrated: in the 1998 Dancing at Lughnasa. That’s because the film is set in the culturally hidebound rural Ireland of 1936. Based on a play by Brian Friel, directed by veteran Irish director Pat O’Connor, and released through Sony Pictures Classics, this is one of those small-scale, actor-driven ensembles pieces that characterized Streep’s work at the turn of the century. Lughnana is at heart a coming of age story, told from the point of view of a child (Darrell Johnston), who recounts a memorable summer on the family farm when his errant father (Rhys Ifans) returns to the family from a long sojourn, as does his missionary uncle (Michael Gambon), who is only intermittently lucid. Streep plays Kate, an aging spinster who rules over her four unmarried sisters and elder brother with an iron hand. She strongly disapproves of the boy’s father, her brother’s candid observations about pagan African culture, and any other deviation from orthodoxy. The mere sight of Streep’s pursed lips captures Kate’s pinched, anxious persona. (Family and townspeople call her “gander” behind her back.)

But this is not her whole story. For Kate is also a teacher at a local Catholic school—or is until the priest who runs it tells her she is likely to be redundant come fall. This represents a serious potential economic setback for the family. It’s also a personal disaster for her, not only because her job is clearly close to the center of her identity, but also the source of the authority that allows her to boss her siblings around. Without it, she will be a husk of herself. Such knowledge tempers our distaste for Kate, who is not wholly lacking in a sense of humor or personal empathy (there’s a nice scene where she gives her nephew a gift before his birthday, regarding him with sad affection, and another of her dancing with her sisters in the final scene of the movie). It’s also a strong statement that the lack of a career can be a tragedy for women, even for women we may not particularly like.

 Conversely, having a career can right a life that is otherwise going off the rails. This is the story of Music of the Heart, the 1999 Miramax feature about the real-life Roberta Guaspari, a violin teacher who won national acclaim (and some controversy from back-to-basics camp in the school reform wars) for her work at a public school in East Harlem. We meet a despairing Guaspari when she has returned home to New York with her two sons after her husband had left her, needing a job. A genial old classmate (Aiden Quinn) directs her to principal-friend (Angela Bassett) who hires her as a music teacher on a fill-in basis. Music of the Heart, a rare foray outside the horror genre for director Wes Craven, fits squarely in its charismatic-teacher-changes-lives tradition that has long been a Hollywood fixture, but is better than most in that there are sustained scenes of Streep’s character in the classroom, interacting with students. The movie also avoids the cliché that a good teacher can somehow transcend any other factor in a child’s life such as the broader school environment or a home life, as we see multiple examples of such adversity. It also avoids unduly idealizing star teacher with infallible pedagogic instincts. Streep’s Roberta can sound surprisingly harsh to her students, criticizing one for having sounding worse than anyone else and demanding to know why, only to learn that the student’s grandmother was mugged and killed. To be sure, it’s stuffed with its fair share of feel-good moments, culminating in the big funding-raising concert at Carnegie Hall. That concert comes about because Quinn’s character refuses to commit to a long-term relationship, and boyfriend #2 (Jay O. Sanders) helps catalyze it with his connections. But in Music of the Heart, men are secondary to the imperatives of a working woman and mother whose life makes a palpable difference in the lives of whose for whom she labors. 

 Next: Streep's Adaptation to a new century.

Maternal care

Streep's greatest roles have been as (tragic) mothers.


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

At the risk of belaboring the point, I want to be clear that I’ve been applying a specific litmus test to Meryl Streep movies, measuring them in terms of whether the women she portrays have an autonomous life apart from any specifically gendered one of wife, lover, or mother. I’ve done so to argue that Streep’s brand of feminism, neither unique to her nor entirely shared, had a specific tenor in the first decade of her career, one that both suggested the possibilities as well as the limits of that feminism in the mainstream popular culture of the Reagan era.

That said, I remain aware of Streep’s injunction about reading too much into her choices. The line I’m drawing is not exactly straight. Still, it is real. Actually, the Streep roles I’ve found most intriguing are the more ambiguous ones that blend private and public feminism. But even those ambiguous ones tend to run toward the private side of the spectrum. As we’ll see, that would change.  

The other thing I need to say before we move on is that Streep has never been particularly ideological in these matters. She’s an artist, not an intellectual. And one who has been committed from the outset to capturing the realities of women’s lives from multiple perspectives, whether or not they happen to be her own.

It’s notable, then, that two of Streep’s greatest performances were a matter of embodying women whose gender identities—particularly the gender identity of mother—are avowedly at the center of who they understand themselves to be. The first is what for a long time was Streep’s signature role, that of Polish émigré Sophie Zawistowski in Sophie’s Choice (1982), for which she won her second Oscar, this time for Best Actress. The movie, based on the semi-autobiographical 1979 novel by William Styron, is presented from the point of view of an aspiring novelist named Stingo, who moves to Brooklyn in 1947 after finishing his education at Duke. He rents a room in a large house whose residents include a vivacious couple, a dashing Jew named Stingo (Kevin Kline) and Streep’s mysterious and alluring Sophie, a Polish-Catholic refugee who fled Nazi Germany. The three enjoy each other’s company immensely, but it becomes increasingly apparent to Stingo that Nathan, who presents himself as a high-powered chemist, is a fraud, and a schizophrenic prone to flying into jealous rage.

Though Nathan is demonstrably insane, he is right in one respect: Stingo is falling in love with Sophie. She, too, is not who she appears to be: she claims her father was an anti-Nazi professor, though we later learn he was Anti-Semitic apologist for the regime. Sophie had a lover in the resistance movement in occupied Poland, who was caught and executed. Sophie herself was caught smuggling a ham for her dying mother and sent to Auschwitz with her children. In about the worst kind of cruelty imaginable, a camp official tells her she must choose which of her children should live. She chooses her son, who is sent to a children’s camp (we don’t learn anything beyond that), while her daughter goes to a crematorium. It is a scene about as wrenching as any in modern cinema, and must have been very difficult to execute.

Streep’s performance is awe-inspiring on many levels, most obvious in the way she reverse-engineered her way to English as a second language, by learning Polish (a language she did not master) and its accent (which she did). As with the French Lieutenant’s Woman, she conveyed a sense of alluring mystery in her character by managing to hold something in reserve that you can sense without ever being told. We also sense a tragic outcome, even as Stingo tries to flee Nathan’s murderous rage by taking her with him to a hotel, from which he hopes to return to the South and marry her, where they can live on a farm he has inherited. But Sophie simply cannot relinquish the horror of her motherhood. Indeed, one suspects her decision to cast her lot with Nathan after the war, a man who abuses her and with whom she can never finally be happy, is an act of self-sabotage.

In a 1983 interview, Streep responded to a journalist’s question about whether Sophie worked while living in New York by saying, “Yeah. Not that we ever saw. But yeah, she worked. Still, that wasn’t what that movie was about.”  Instead, what it’s about is a mother’s grief. Sophie indulges Stingo with a night of fantasy, but returns to Nathan, with whom she commits suicide. Her death, like her life, can only be defined in terms of others.

 Sophie’s Choice was a tour de force showcase for Streep’s talents. But her acting in A Cry in the Dark (1988) is all the more powerful for its understated quality. Here she’s another true-life character, Australian Lindy Chamberlain, who became ensnared in a media maelstrom in 1980 after she was accused of murdering her infant daughter despite her insistence that the child had been killed by a dingo, a wild dog indigenous to Australia, during a camping trip. Streep mastered yet another accent for this role, one she said she found more difficult because unlike Isak Dinesen or Karen Silkwood, Chamberlain was still alive and still in the public eye, and someone whose idiosyncratic expression required more precise emulation. But it’s the helmeted quality of Chamberlain’s expression, the Puritanical mien of a committed Seventh-Day Adventist married to a minister (Sam Neill), that badly damaged her public image, and which Streep captures in her performance.

Cry in the Dark was directed by Australian Fred Schepisi, who also directed Streep in Plenty. It performed poorly at the U.S. box office, probably because American viewers were not widely familiar with the scandal, and because the material is so wrenching. But Streep nevertheless earned yet another Oscar nomination for the role. Since nominations come from fellow actors—winners are chosen by the membership of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences as a whole—such recognition is an honor in its own right, and a testimonial to Streep’s realized ambition to represent the reality of a woman’s life on her own terms, in this case a woman who saw herself first and foremost wife and mother.

By the end of the 1980s, then, Streep was not simply a movie star, but a cinematic brand—a virtuoso known for high-wire characterizations in artistically challenging dramas. Asked by a film professor at the University of Kansas in 1988 whether she still takes a secret delight in jumping into a movie with a new face on, Streep said yes with a laugh. “It’s part of what I get criticized for,” she noted. “But that’s what the joy of it is for me.”

In the years that followed, however, Streep began seeking out somewhat different joys.

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Next: Streep in (comic) transition.

Engendering humor

Streep's comic approach to middle-aged womanhood


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

In 1989, Meryl Streep turned 40. By that point, she had crossed into “woman of a certain age” territory, at least in Hollywood terms, and as such had entered rocky shoals. It has long been the conventional wisdom that female stars fade in Hollywood, and while there have always been exceptions (Sally Field, Susan Sarandon, and Helen Mirren come to mind), illustrations of the rule (Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer and Melanie Griffith, all a decade younger than Streep) are not hard to generate. Though she never has never gone more three years without appearing in a movie, and has appeared in two or more movies in the same year a dozen times, there is a general perception that Streep’s star power dimmed in the 1990s, when she typically surfaced annually. Partly this is a matter of choice; these were years when she was actively raising children, and logistical considerations, like the locale of a shoot, have often been factors for her. But the quality of the roles she took was sometimes weaker, principally when the women she played were so saintly as to lack the edgy interest of a Joanna Kramer, Lindy Chamberlain, or even Karen Blixen. Still, Streep was never a passive recipient of parts, and while it’s clear that she acted on instinct, there’s surprising consistency in batches of choices that she made in the second decade of her career.

The first such batch of choices involved a set of roles that satirically deconstructed the idea of womanhood itself. The conventional wisdom is that after ten years of appearing in serious drama, Streep made leap into comedy. This was indeed a shift, and while critical and commercial reception was initially mixed, it proved to be a durable one: Streep has been a reliable cinematic source of laughter ever since, particularly in the last decade. But it’s those first few movies, a quartet of films she made between 1989 and 1992 that I want to focus on here. Though they were not highly regarded, they’re surprisingly coherent in the way they play with notions of gender.

The first, and perhaps most obvious example is She-Devil (1989). In what was widely regarded at the time as an odd piece of casting, Streep’s co-star was Roseanne Barr, a stand-up comedian who was approaching the peak of her cultural status as a working-class icon of feminism on the strength of her hit TV series Roseanne (1988-1997). But the dramatic contrast between the aristocratic-looking Streep and dumpy-looking Barr, which was played to the hilt, is essentially the core premise of the movie. She-Devil, based on the 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil  by British writer Fay Weldon, had been made into a four-part BBC television series in 1986.  The main storyline of all iterations involves a housewife and mother named Ruth Patchett, whose accountant husband (Ed Begley Jr. in the movie) leaves her for a famous romance novelist named Mary Fisher (Streep). Patchett then systematically responds to this betrayal by dismantling the public and private pillars of her husband’s and Mary’s, life. In its literally explosive garishness, the film version of She-Devil makes the BBC series seem downright prim by comparison. Barr goes out of her way to accentuate her ugliness as Ruth (as in ruthless), though she’ll undergo a transformation before it’s all over. But it’s Streep’s performance that endows the movie with a comic zing by giving us a Mary Fisher who’s both sharply observed and almost impossibly over the top at the same time. The funniest scene in the movie is a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous profile by the real-life host of the series, Robin Leach. “They find ways to make the man feel important and comfortable,” she says of her novels in a breathy voice, her blond tresses framed by a pink dress, pink nails, and poodle with pink ribbons.  “To let him know that he is—pregnant pause—the man. You know, so, there’s no confusion.” Mary later condescendingly marvels about “all the little families, mommies and daddies and dear little children tucked away for the night. How lucky they all are.” She will of course get her comeuppance, and Streep is as least as game in playing her descent, already underway when she snappishly evades being caught in a lie about her age. Ruth, for her part, begins her revival by dumping the kids at Mary’s house end entering the work force, something she does in the service of her master plan, but which results in a promising new career. These strongly feminist accents are undercut a bit, in that the story ends with Ruth’s husband rejoining the family after his release from prison for embezzlement, which she helped expose: Why would she want the lout back? Mary, for her part, recovers from a tepidly received final novel (she’s seen painfully ignored at a mall book-signing) to reinvent herself as a Serious Writer with a memoir, Trust and Betrayal: A Docu-novel of Love, Money and Skepticism (our last view of her is at a bookstore signing flirting with a charming Frenchman). Revenge may be sweet, but it need not be complete. Besides, the Other Woman was never the primary problem anyway; the feckless man is.

Next: Other Streep deconstructions of gender.