John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#19 —Madeline Ashton, a past-her-prime Hollywood actress who goes to great lengths to preserve her good looks.
MATTHEW: Meryl Streep and her good friend Goldie Hawn once came very close to riding off a cliff together. During the early 1990s, the pair had been in search of a dual-star vehicle to appear in and were initially in contention to play the titular roles in Thelma & Louise, along with one-time possibilities Jodie Foster, Frances McDormand, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Hawn and Streep actively courted Pathé Entertainment’s former C.E.O. Alan Ladd, Jr. for the parts and even tossed around ideas for a happier alternate ending. (Streep, who would have played Louise, wanted Thelma to live.) Eventually, Streep’s schedule got in the way, while Ladd deemed Hawn an iffy fit for the project, clearing the way for Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon to take on the most popular parts of their careers...
In my mind, Death Becomes Her, the movie that ultimately united these two powerhouses, has always lived in the shadow of the collaboration that could have been, even though I wouldn’t trade Davis and Sarandon for anyone. Bewilderingly enough, this project of ours has occasioned my first viewing of Zemeckis’ ghoulishly funny cult classic, a sturdy box-office performer but a critical flatliner that has since gone to become something close to a gay rite of passage, a Pride month staple with fans ranging from Kristin Chenoweth to (woof) Michael B. Jordan.
In Madeline Ashton, a desperate leading lady who lures away the oafish Dr. Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis) from her frumpy friend-cum-rival Helen Sharp (Hawn), Streep finds one of her most archly accessible character creations, an out-and-out villainess with withering one-liners and monstrous tendencies who sits at the very center of a major motion picture. This isn’t exactly Streep’s first time breaking bad, but it might be her first time doing so with the full support of all involved: her dizzy society gossip in Julia is much too pathetic to be an unequivocal villain, and while Woody Allen certainly hated her ice-veined lesbian in Manhattan, Streep at least endowed the character with some glimmers of humanity. She-Devil probably came the closest to turning pre-Death Becomes Her Streep into a full-bore antagonist, but even that film ultimately copped-out of embracing Mary Fisher as the true harridan it wanted, providing her with an out-of-nowhere feminist reinvention in its half-hearted finale.
I’m happy to discover Streep plays a primping prima donna with more delectable verve in Death Becomes Her than she managed to pull off in She-Devil. As in that film, Streep doesn’t hold back from extravagant stylization, but the effect here is far more cohesive. She plays Madeline to the hilt with a giddy but deceptively brittle meanness that makes this perpetually irked vixen into an irresistible screen creature of classical womanly grace yet lethal derangement, like a modern-day Margo Channing with the warped mindset of a Baby Jane Hudson. “My character… is very evil. And it’s not her own fault,” Streep said in an interview for the film. “She can’t help it… The world, and the way it is, forces her to behave the way she does. That’s my rationale.”
It’s certainly an unbridled thrill to see Streep supply her rangy talents to an audacious genre experiment that’s also a truly inspired body-horror comedy and a poison-pen industry parody… but does Death Becomes Her, and Streep herself, actually end up inviting too much disdain for this spitefully self-conscious figure, rather than the dopey men and larger, insidious industry that ingrains such feelings into women like Madeline in the first place? Is this just a priggish take on a movie whose blazing satirical streak I genuinely enjoyed? What did you make of Meryl and Madeline Ashton, actress, woman, star, and lover?
JOHN: Oh Ms. Ashton, where have you been? Death Becomes Her is probably the most exciting discovery of this series yet, a newfound object of my affection that I can’t explain not having seen until now. Madeline Ashton is undoubtedly one of Streep’s most challenging roles, an atypical feat of both emotional honesty and outsized physicality. At seven months, it’s still the longest shoot of her career, and the only one in which Streep’s performance relies heavily upon special effects. It’s as if Streep took note of all the criticisms waged against her — too serious, getting old, too intellectual, Miss Decorporealization — and doubled down on her virtuoustic capabilities, quelling any doubts that she could go big and guignol in a cutting-edge mainstream bid and still retain her signature knack for creating fully-dimensional portraits of complex women.
I can’t remember watching Streep have this much fun with a role as worthy of her abilities since… Karen Silkwood? In what is perhaps her most purely comedic performance, Streep’s ability to toss out one-liners is downright Olympian. From “Could you just not breathe?” to “Now a warning?!” to “A colagen buff? You might as well ask me to wash with soap and water” to her taunting extension of the word “flaccid,” Streep’s comedic abilities fully match her dramatic prowess. Madeline also takes Streep’s forte for transformation to new, never-before-seen heights, twists, and decapitations. Lifting herself up off the floor after tumbling down those stairs, walking backward, and looking down before exclaiming, “Ernest... my ass! I can see MY ASS!” is a seamless and hilarious feat of physical and special-effects-assisted acting, especially considering the grueling technological repetition such a scene necessitated in the early ‘90s.
If you reconsider Bruce Willis’ Dr. Melville as Death Becomes Her’s MacGuffin, and read Madeline and Helen’s unchecked pursuit of Ernest as a chiefly symbolic preoccupation, the case against the film’s misogynistic tendencies loses some potency. Though hyperbolic, Death Becomes Her is a self-aware parody that never feels cruel or contemptuous of its imperfect heroines, as She-Devil does. In her fabulous chapter on the film in her "Anatomy of an Actor" book, Karina Longworth notes, “The specter of a woman confronting her own objectification and struggling to live up to expectations is the antithesis of entertainment.” In exposing the strenuous labor and fabrication involved in creating the feminine ideal, the film’s grotesquery is purposefully off-putting. You can draw a direct line from Death Becomes Her to Feud: Bette and Joan, another saga of two aging actresses whose infighting doubles as critique and result of a misogynist system. Streep surely invites disdain for Hollywood’s obsession with youth and impossibly perfect female bodies, but never at the expense of her headstrong, though undoubtedly nefarious, Madeline, who is both product and synecdoche of her ignorant industry. There are chinks in Madeline’s siliconed armor, a justified sense of loneliness and exasperation that lends a sympathetic air to Streep’s performance, as when she confronts her young boy-toy and cries herself into a thunderstorm before arriving at the mansion of Lisle (Isabella Rossellini). There is compassion even in Streep’s most exaggerated movements, like when she watches her features rise and tighten after drinking the elixir, cooing “I’m… a… girl!” at her rejuvenated figure in the mirror, a moment both funny and tragic.
MATTHEW: Can I take a moment to just restate that, as if this movie wasn’t wonderful enough, Isabella Fucking Rossellini is in it and doing some delicious vamping as the age-defying socialite who provides Madeline and Helen with their immortal elixir?
I think you’re right that the film’s commentary about Hollywood’s misogyny is more intricately embedded within the narrative than it may outwardly appear, as opposed to Zemeckis and company actually peddling misogyny itself. So many of Madeline’s moments that you mention are evidence of this critical throughline in the film. But they also illustrate the ways in which Streep is able to temper her own performance to foreground these provocative points at certain stages and then just as capably subdue them for the sake of a scathingly good time. She isn’t necessarily parsing through fine-grained nuances of a character, but she still connects all the supplied notes of this vain, venal glamourpuss with imperious gusto and a brazen disregard for audience sympathy. I love that Streep practically decides to play her marital spats with Willis like Martha in a Brentwood production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She’s even more ingenious when paired with the women, whether tossing Rossellini at least a dozen different looks of narrow-eyed inquisition during their first meeting or gleefully indulging in such catty bad behavior with Hawn. The sight of these two intrepid leading ladies wrestling, shovels-in-hand, with aging, a quandary that all actresses in Hollywood — even these two — face, is a mind-blowing rarity. Hawn and Streep are such a gloriously one-upping pair that the film could have truly used more scenes devoted to these infectious and categorically-dissimilar screen icons.
Their relative lack of shared screen time is probably why we’ve seldom seen Streep return to projects of such technological sophistication. “My first, my last, my only,” Streep declared when asked about Death Becomes Her in an Entertainment Weekly profile in 2000. “I think it’s tedious. Whatever concentration you can apply to that kind of comedy is just shredded. You stand there like a piece of machinery — they should get machinery to do it. I loved how it turned out. But it’s not fun to act to a lampstand… It was like being at the dentist.” It’s hard to argue with Streep’s assertion that such computer-reliant performances dehumanize the acting process, but it’s also an (infrequent) pleasure to see Streep’s own mastery matched by a film of such astonishing ambition. The methods may have been monotonous, but the outcome is hard to dispute. Streep still comes out on top, giving zesty conviction to a hard-hearted starlet that she indelibly explodes from the inside-out.
So, we’re quite a long way from the likes of Joanna Kramer and Sophie Zawistowska. Do you see Death Becomes Her as part of a definitively different era not only in Streep’s career but in her performance style as well?
JOHN: You’ve sussed out a key distinction in Streep’s work in Death Becomes Her that I notice threaded throughout her subsequent films, her ability to both foreground and subdue rich ideas while also amusing her audience, giving the viewer a double dose of intellect and entertainment. Many of Streep’s films, from Death Becomes Her to The Bridges of Madison County, Adaptation to Hope Springs, lend themselves as equally to a satisfyingly good time as to a rich exploration of subjects pertinent to that audience category Hollywood tends to avoid like the plague: the middle-aged woman. Performance-wise, Death Becomes Her demonstrates Streep’s polished ability to match the tenor and scope of her films while simultaneously dipping into her own star persona. While this is not exactly a new side of Streep’s abilities, her charisma, presence, and generous spirit coalesce here like never before. Death Becomes Her, it must also be said, could be considered the forebear of some too broad, caricatured performances waiting for us down the line. But no matter; let us end in genuflection to Madeline Ashton and the ebulliently virtuosic performer who brought this diva to life, and death.
