NO STOPPING HER MOVIE MIGHT
What makes Meryl Streep — a critical and box-office darling — such an ongoing success?
The age of the movie star isn’t over quite yet. There’s one actor whose five most successful films of the past 10 years have made just shy of $1.9 billion worldwide. Not one of those films is, or even has, a sequel: all are one-offs aimed at older audiences, and fall into such styles as middle-age romance, television chef biopic and other genres liable to cause night sweats among studio executives. These five films have only two things in common. One is that they all made more money than almost anyone expected. The other is that they all star Meryl Streep.
Her latest project, a biopic of the notoriously awful opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins, also starring Hugh Grant, seems unlikely to break the Streep Streak. To Hollywood, she must be doing something right, but no one quite seems able to work out what. It’s not as simple as her being a great actress — although judged on Oscar nominations alone (she has a record-breaking 19), she’s the best ever; and on wins (three), only four-time honouree Katharine Hepburn ranks higher.
But awards don’t necessarily equal popular success. Between 1979 and 1991, she was in the running for an Oscar more often than not: two wins and seven further nominations in 13 years. Her performances had been transformative, suppressed thunderstorm stuff in a string of steely literary adaptations and biographical dramas such as Ironweed, Silkwood and A Cry in the Dark. (Psychological precision was an early Streep trademark; note-perfect accents was another.)
Only three of those films, however, could be described as hits, and those were the best picture winners: The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer and Out of Africa. Here’s the tricky bit: the characters that drew Streep’s eye in her first decade on screen just weren’t all that lovable — and something actresses have to deal with that their male counterparts don’t is that audiences love to be able to love them. Streep’s exasperation at this may have come to a head in 1990, when she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as a frazzled actress fresh out of rehab in the Mike Nichols comedy Postcards from the Edge.
She lost to Julia Roberts, who won for playing the sex worker with the polystyrene smile in Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman. That film’s success evidently grated on her: it’s a supposed “women’s film” that endorses and reinforces every male sex and power fantasy in the book.
In a speech to the Screen Actors Guild that August, she observed that Hollywood’s predilection for certain types of female roles was cheating actresses out of opportunities their male counterparts enjoyed for life.
“In a season where most of the female leads are prostitutes, there’s not going to be a lot of work for women over 40,” she said. “Like hookers, actresses seem to lose their market appeal around that age (when) most male actors are just approaching their peak earning potential.”
Twenty-six years later, Streep seems to have proven herself wrong. But has she? Streep is currently in more or less uncharted territory. By her mid-60s, even the mighty Hepburn had been largely typecast as what the critic Andrew Britton memorably described as “either a devouring mother or a batty old lady.” But while Streep’s recent roles tend toward eccentricity — and Florence Foster Jenkins lunges at it — menfolk are often a central part of the equation. The difference is her characters aren’t defined by them: they are by her.
After the Florence preview screening, I asked Streep how she goes about choosing her roles. “If someone interesting is in a story, I fall in love with her, and I have to feel like her, and I have to be her,” she replied. “I don’t think there’s a particular kind of woman I like to play. But I would like to see what it’s like to be a man.”
Compare Streep’s career arc with those of her contemporaries like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
To an extent, De Niro and Pacino have both been left stranded by their success, perpetually trading on earlier work, if not regurgitating it.
Streep doesn’t need to do this. There’s no persona to cash in on or subvert.
And her onscreen transformations, dramatic as they are, don’t entail any macho self-abasement. No method madness or “uglying up”: just lived-in plausibility.
I asked Streep what she made of the current craze for difficult acting. Is a role that was obviously a struggle — say, Leonardo DiCaprio’s ordeal in The Revenant — more valuable than a performance that seems to slip past as spontaneously as life?
“Leo DiCaprio only fought an imaginary bear,” she replied, with a barely detectable twinkle. “Hugh had to listen to me singing for real.”