THE OSCARS
How the most celebrated actress of our time lost her way
Over the last decade of her career, Meryl S tree p’ s performances have been generous ly described by film critics as “theatrical,” “tour de force,” “overpowering.” She’s been described as having “a whale of a time,” as being “the giant flaming ball of gas” at the centre of a solar system of a cast, and as having “the gusto of a tornado laying waste to a small town.” In other words, there is no such thing as a bad Meryl Streep performance, there are only big Meryl Streep performances.
After all, she’s Meryl Streep. With a glowing resumé that includes searing performance sin The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, her list of accomplishments really does go on and on. And there is no denying Streep is a great acting talent, if not the greatest. This year, she broke her own record with her 21st Oscar nomination, for playing Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in Steven Spielberg’s The Post.
But there is a difference between talent and spectacle, and one might say Streep crossed that line in 2008, when she starred alongside Amy Adams in Julie & Julia, reducing iconic chef Julia Child to a warbling clown in a curly wig. You could say that this was the character – there is certainly an element of warble to Child in the kitchen – but Streep has been imprisoned in that performance for the last decade.
In her next major film, The Iron Lady, Streep donned a similarly jaunty wig to play Margaret Thatcher – no longer simply verging on caricature but fully committed to it. In 2013’s August: Osage County, Tracy Letts’s already melodramatic material lost a layer of its authenticity with Streep’s overt theatricality. Despite her limited musical ability, she followed these roles with a singing witch in Into the Woods and as a former musician in Ricki and the Flash. And then, with a pinch of art imitating life, she played the title role of Florence Foster Jenkins in the 2016 film about a real life New York heiress who dreamed of being an opera singer despite her terrible singing voice. And yet, Streep has continued to reel in the Oscar nominations. Of course, the Academy has always prized big, flashy performances over smaller, nu- anced ones. Fake noses, dramatic weight gains and mastery of obscure accents are ideal Oscar bait – something Streep knows well. But with a natural talent, Streep never needed that bait in the past. Nevertheless, she’s come to rely on accents and costumes in recent years, which only truly serve to distract from the talent beneath, burying the Streep we so wholeheartedly admired. In fact, her last great performance could be 2008’s Doubt, in which she played a Catholic school principal questioning the nature of a priest’s relationship with a young student. Her performance is bare bones. There’s no wig to rely on, only her raw emotion, evolving from the collected cool of a believer to the terrified trepidation of a skeptic. It’s Streep doing what Streep does best – completely disappearing into the character and not underneath the unnecessary help of weighty props.
Where did the actress who could cast a single glance and translate a spectrum of emotion go? Walking down the street in Manhattan, her hair flowing; when she confronts Robert De Niro’s Michael in The Deer Hunter after he returns from the war; endearingly arguing with Dustin Hoffman over custody of their child in Kramer vs. Kramer; when she charmingly and bashfully meets Clint Eastwood’s Robert Kincaid for the first time in The Bridges of Madison County; casting judgment in The Devil Wears Prada with not much more than a furrowed brow.
At 68 years old, Streep still has the subtlety that built her legacy. But it’s a legacy in danger of crumbling. The disastrous roles she’s recently in- habited haven’t just harmed her own reputation, they’ve also had a diminishing effect on accolades for her peers. It seems as though there is always a Best Actress nomination slot reserved for Streep, and this year it comes at the expense of Michelle Williams. In 2017, there was no room for Amy Adams, and in 2014, none for Julia Roberts – all actresses who haven’t yet resorted to Streep’s brand of confused theatre.
And Streep isn’t alone in this regard; Denzel Washington also managed to score a Best Actor nomination this year for the panned Roman J. Israel, Esq., in which he, too, does a little too much in a film that did not know how best to use him. These two often-honoured actors have gotten too comfortable in the space they’ve been afforded and the praise with which they’ve been rewarded.
For Streep, at least, perhaps there is hope to be found in television, where more and more film actors are harnessing their tendency for grandeur into sparing subtleties; such is the beauty of episodic television, where time lends character and story far more nuance. Following in the footsteps of Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern, Streep recently signed on to join the cast of HBO’s award- winning drama Big Little Lies for its second season. She’ll not only be joined by a talented cast, but by acclaimed director Andrea Arnold and writer David E. Kelley. Moving away from the big screen and toward the smaller one, Streep may benefit from finally stepping off of centre-stage and rediscovering just what brought her there in the first place.