 Starring: Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt
Director: David Frankel
Year Of Release: 2006
Plot: Naive new graduate Andrea Sachs is hired to work as the second assistant of the powerful and sophisticated Miranda Priestly, the ruthless and merciless executive of the Runway fashion magazine. Andrea dreams of becoming a proper journalist, which makes her an odd fit in a world of people claw the way to the top of the fashion world. However as Andrea changes her attitude and behaviour to try and fit in, it begins affecting her private life and the relationship with her boyfriend, Nate. |
I think it’s safe to say that in most polls of the Best Actor working in Hollywood (of either gender), Meryl Streep would come out on top (unless you only asked girls under 20, and then it’d be Robert Pattinson). She is ridiculously revered and by far the most Oscar nominated actor in history, with 16 nods spread over 32 years.
However less mentioned is that she’s one of the top actresses whatever metric you use. If you go by box office, she’s one of the top 10 highest grossing actresses in the history of the movies, with her films having taken over $1.6 billion at the US box office. If you strip out the actresses whose box office is largely down to a single massive franchise (such as Emma Watson with Harry Potter and Kirsten Dunst with Spider-man), she goes up into the top five.
Some say that for much of her career she’s been very good in some middling films, and while that’s often been true (The River Wild, The Bridges Of Madison Country), she’s appeared in more than her fair share of modern classics. The Deer Hunter, Manhattan and Kramer vs. Kramer are just out and out great films, while Sophie’s Choice, Julia and Out Of Africa also have their place in movie history. Personally I still think her greatest moment was in Cry In The Dark – a movie I’m ashamed to say I don’t own – which I reckon is a severely underrated movie and in my opinion one of the best movies ever made about how a tragedy becoming an international event can effect a family (in the case of A Cry In The Dark, whether Lindy Chamberlain’s killed her daughter or if the baby was carried off by a dingo).
While I’m on the subject of underrated Streep movies, there’s also Plenty, which was directed by the same man who made A Cry In The Dark, Fred Schepisi, and features one of Streep’s best performances, even if it wasn’t one she was Oscar nominated for. I think the reason both of these movies have fallen under the radar is because while Streep’s ability to fully inhabit a role is what has made her one of cinema’s greatest actresses, in both A Cry In The Dark and Plenty she shows that while most actors desperately want the audience to like them, Streep doesn’t care, and isn’t afraid to play complex women who aren’t actually all the pleasant, but who seem extremely real.
It’s particularly effective A Cry In The Dark, as much of the success of the film rests on whether Lindy Chamberlain killed her baby or not. Most actresses might toy with the character’s guilt, but would be at pains to present Lindy as an innocent woman wronged, being persecuted by a hysterical public who would prefer to think her a murderer than that a dingo killed her baby. It would become about the actresses ego, not wanting to come across as a bitch on screen. However Streep doesn’t care about this. She presents Lindy as a rather cold, controlled woman. While it doesn’t make her at all sympathetic, it ensures the movie is all the more fascinating.
Streep’s Chamberlain is just the sort of person you can imagine being the centre of a media witch-hunt, where someone’s actual guilt or innocence becomes subservient to whether the press thinks the person is showing the appropriate reactions and levels of grief (which is pretty much what happened to Chamberlain and others, such as the parents of JonBenet Ramsay). It’s a truly incredible portrayal and in my opinion one of the best pieces of acting in movie history, although rarely seen as such because Streep is so unlikeable for most of the film.
But that’s the thing with Streep, you always get the feeling the role is more important to her than her own ego is. Whether she personally looks good or bad and whether her character is likable or not is less important that whether it's right for that role and the film as a whole. Take Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada. It would have been easy to simply turn the character into a scene-stealing caricature harridan. However Streep does more than that, breathing life into a woman who may be a bitch, but feels like a real human being. It’s vitally important to the film, because otherwise it would be difficult to understand why Anna Hathaway’s character gets so caught in the world of the fashion magazine, which she initially looks down on. Streep shows how someone like Miranda can be magnetic (as is the woman the character is supposedly based on, Vogue editor Anna Wintour). Streep scored yet another Oscar nomination for the role – and how many other rom coms can you think of that even got a sniff of Academy recognition?
Even when Streep takes a seemingly silly role in something like Mamma Mia, she manages to turn paper-thin character into something far more watchable and entertaining than it should be. In some ways it was a vanity project, as although she didn’t initiate the film, she’s harboured dreams of being in musicals since she was a little girl attending Broadway shows. Although she tried out for Evita in the 90s, and has sung in a few other movies (Postcards From The Edge, A Prairie Home Companion, Silkwood), Mamma Mia! Was her chance to do a proper musical and she revelled in it, bringing the same level of dedication to the role as she would anything else. She helped make it the most successful musical in box office history, grossing $609 million around the world.
I think it’s her lack of vanity and dedication, mixed with a mastery of the craft, that’s assured Streep has remained one of the best actresses around for the last 30-odd years. The likes of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino used to the same, but nowadays seem to have given that up in favour of easy paydays. She’s an actress who isn’t afraid to make brave choices or look bad (it were her idea to go without makeup in Devil Wears Prada in the scene where she admits her fears for her children), which is far rarer that you’d think. Even when she takes the sort of nothing roles that have become De Niro and Pacino’s bread and butter (shall we call them the Meet The Parents roles?) she breathes far more life into them than perhaps they deserve, and certainly a lot more than she could get away with without anyone complaining.
It means that at the age of 60, when most other actresses are being put out to pasture, she is probably having her most successful period to date, at the box office and critically (five Oscar nominations in 10 years ain’t bad going). So let us all salute Queen Meryl.
TIM ISAAC
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