The Film Experience

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.

#24 —Lee, a frazzled single mom and aspiring hairdresser who reunites with her ailing sister.

JOHN: Marvin’s Room begins with a slow outward zoom of assorted pill bottles and other medical paraphernalia scored to whimsically upbeat music that immediately establishes the film’s split personality between dysfunctional family comedy and sentimental illness drama. We soon learn that the titular Marvin is the bedridden and near-death father of Bessie (Diane Keaton) and brother of Ruth (Gwen Verdon), three members of a looney Floridian family. No sooner than Marvin’s illness and medical routine is introduced, Bessie is herself diagnosed with leukemia by Dr. Robert De Niro (who also produced the film). He recommends that Bessie's family members be tested for a possible bone marrow transplant. This diagnosis is the film’s engine, reuniting her with her sister Lee (Meryl Streep) and nephews Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Charlie (Hal Scardino), bridging a twenty year gap between this estranged family...

We’re first introduced to Lee as Hank torches a picture of her, tossing it onto a gasoline-doused pile in the middle of his bedroom, setting the house ablaze. Streep, clad in purple, her hair teased high, receives the news while working on a fellow beauty school classmate, calmly suggesting to her that “there’s no reason to be nervous, you just have to adopt a positive mental attitude,” moments before her life quickly unravels; Hank is sent to a psychiatric hospital and Lee and Charlie, having no other family (or friends?), move into a convent, a tactic that emphasizes Lee’s uncouth and impetuous behavior. Chain-smoking, fed up, and frazzled, Lee is an atypical but refreshing persona for Streep, whose gifts for comedy and lived-in spontaneity brush up against the off-putting and often ditzy facets of Lee’s disorganized personality. Not since Silkwood had Streep turned in this full a portrait of a working-class woman overwhelmed by the unfair hand she has been dealt. You get the sense that Streep relished the opportunity to go big and uncorked after a string of roles which emphasized her preternatural poise and good-natured temperament. Lee can be a pill, but Streep is clearly having a blast.

Which is not to say that Streep is disinterested in fleshing out this woman who, at first, eschews audience sympathy. Though Lee may cluelessly place a handful of M&Ms on her zonked-out son’s chest while visiting him in the hospital, defy hospital administrator Margo Martindale’s request that she not smoke in her office, or fail to appropriately respond to Hank’s heartfelt apology, Streep knows how to bake in moments of heart and vulnerability in order to gain the viewer’s compassion. Just before arriving in Florida, Lee stands in front of a gas station bathroom mirror, putting in hair extensions and rehearsing her hellos to her reflection. The scene underscores Streep’s knack for piercing through to a character’s core, exposing a tender and almost childishly sensitive soul underneath Lee’s acidic veneer.

When Streep and Keaton finally share a scene together, one feels as though this on-screen combination is the single glorious reason for the entire production’s existence, an actressexual match made in heaven. Even upon their first encounter, you realize the challenge embedded in their casting, with both Streep and Keaton playing against type, switching the more logical roles of Streep as saint and Keaton as neurotic. Why don’t you take us through some highlights of this inspired match?

MATTHEW: It has probably been at least a decade since I first watched Marvin’s Room, but it remains such a pleasure to witness these two sublime actresses feed off each other’s very different but equally distinctive creative energies. Keaton ultimately received the Oscar nomination (in one of the most overwhelmingly marvelous Best Actress rosters that AMPAS ever produced), but that’s not to say that Streep is in any way giving a lesser performance. On the contrary, Streep’s missed nomination speaks to the stiff competition of 1996, but also to the relative mutedness of her chosen approach, which grows increasingly selfless as the film progresses and begins to afford Keaton’s comparably timid Bessie most of its solitary attention and manifest sympathies.

Perhaps it’s because of this measured understatement that I didn’t immediately buy Streep as a blowzy, working-class single mother duly overwhelmed by financial straits and an uncontrollable delinquent son. Interestingly enough, Streep, who was introduced to McPherson’s play by longtime friend De Niro, was originally offered the role of Bessie. She not only turned it down but urged the filmmakers to cast Keaton in the part, so much so that it seems as if Streep’s participation in this project was contingent on Keaton’s involvement. Streep told the Los Angeles Times:

I never saw anyone else but Diane for Bessie. She has such a sense of what’s humorous, yet it’s always rooted in reality, so unforced and unself-conscious.”

As for what drew her to Lee, Streep noted, “I felt it was time I played a bad mother… I’d played angry women before — like in Plenty — but none quite so direct and un-neurotic about it, so fueled by fury.” The role seems to beckon for a frostier, no-bullshit presence, an actress along the lines of Mercedes Ruehl or Kate Nelligan, each of whom were coming off peak periods that would quickly wane in the mid-to-late 1990s but were, by then, recognizably adept at letting us glimpse the humanity beneath slightly gaudy women, by turns good-natured and tough-as-nails. Yet Lee isn’t really a successor to the wisecracking, gently clichéd creations essayed by Nelligan in Frankie & Johnny and Ruehl at nearly every stage of her career. Scott McPherson’s storytelling may be soppy but it’s also frequently touching and true-to-life. Lee isn’t written as a discernible caricature or a vital life force, but a stoic everyday woman who simply has too much on her plate.

Streep is, as ever, inclined towards the fundamental honesty of a character and the provided material, but she also takes the screenplay’s comedy in stride, letting it subtly seep into her speech and comportment. She makes a vivid impression, no question, but she manages to do so without playing the attention-grabber that this particular part could have so easily become. Instead, she anchors many a scene with quiet force, dredging up certain truths about these people that might have gone undetected by a more broadly comedic take. Streep can, unsurprisingly, sell the hell out of a passive-aggressive battle with DiCaprio over a bowl of potato chips, riotously playing both the irritant and irritated. But she’s equally arresting when letting a look of blanched and flinching discomfort slip across her face, allowing us to discern the ways in which Bessie’s casual but cutting judgments and gradual closeness to Hank are sources of exasperation and envy for Lee.

Meryl with baby Leo!

Streep wields a similarly calm control over her costars in each of their conversations, never straining for thematic import but embodying the emotional honesty of these exchanges with little fuss. Keaton is granted most of the pathos (and movingly conveys it), but it’s Streep who ultimately has the harder task of gauging the appropriate reaction for each sentimental reveal, treading a thin boundary between stealing a moment for oneself and conveying just the right amount of character in moments that call for Lee to be little more than a silent witness. Streep errs on the side of the latter, but she manages to make a memorable impression even when playing second fiddle. She looks so visibly flustered by Keaton’s reveal of a tragic, unknown romance from her youth while still ceding the scene almost entirely to her on-screen sister, perhaps knowing that she will be rewarded soon after with a single, affecting shot in which a shaking Lee chokes back tears in private. Here, Streep filters that uniquely painful feeling of being confronted, quite abruptly, with a loved one’s helpless vulnerability through a permeable poignancy whose closest equivalent can be found in the worried, sad-eyed glances that Kristen Stewart throws at Julianne Moore in the latter half of Still Alice.

Later on, Streep reigns in her own response during Keaton’s big speech about love and luck, registering fear and confusion while remaining actively present in the same space. Streep’s restraint in the face of Keaton’s lavish outpouring speaks volumes, more than any pair of crying eyes ever could, about the ambiguous nature of familial ties, such as Bessie and Lee’s, that only gradually reveal the full extent of their affection and devotion.

What else stands out to you about Streep’s with any of her other scene partners, like a pre-Titanic DiCaprio?

JOHN: I enjoyed Streep showing DiCaprio how to act, and even if her being his mom was a hard sell, she develops a level of uninhibited exasperation that he clearly benefits from, pushing his own narcissism in more interesting, and challenging, directions. I had attributed Keaton’s nomination to the Academy bestowing a long-overdue third nod to their own Annie Hall, and Streep’s omission as a sign of voters growing tired after their 10-nomination love affair. But, as you’ve rightly pointed out, Streep’s sustained subtlety is at odds with Oscar’s typical acting preferences. Streep develops such a generous camaraderie with Keaton throughout Marvin’s Room that one gets the impression that Lee, as opposed to Streep, is tactfully allowing Bessie the space and time to process key plot developments. In such instances, Streep seems to offer the spotlight entirely to Keaton. And even before the pivotal scene that you described above, when Lee is shaken by the sight of Bessie’s hair loss, Streep underplays her shock and discomfort as we would expect someone to do in real life; in moments like these, she claims Lee as a sympathetic figure, not merely an uproarious foil to Bessie.

While the character is messy and brash, upon closer inspection, Streep’s performance is defined as much by self-control as it is by self-assurance. The actress, unsurprisingly, rescues Lee from the walking mental-breakdown caricature she could have been, proving her tremendous range again in a movie whose own disparate tones often seem irreconcilable.

Catch up with 'Months of Meryl' why don't you?