Months of Meryl: Music of the Heart (1999)

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

#27 — Roberta Guaspari, a real-life violinist and instructor who brought music education to the classrooms of Harlem.

MATTHEW:  One of the pitfalls that tends to come with occupying such a prominent position in the highly public realm of moviemaking is a gradual inability to disappear into the most straightforward of roles. I’m not talking about the magical acts of self-vanishing that allow Daniel Day-Lewis to seemingly become figures as disparate as Bill the Butcher and Abraham Lincoln nor the larger-than-life personas achieved through virtuosic, full-scale deglamorizations by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Charlize Theron, but rather the everyday characters who may achieve great things but whose lives are decisively rooted in reality, their appearances neither remarkable nor particularly conspicuous. No matter how hard a performer tries to shed her star persona and immerse herself in distinctly un-Hollywood settings, it is often up to us, the viewers, to forget everything we know about a star in order to actually believe her as, more or less, one of us...

Click to read more ...

Months of Meryl: One True Thing (1998)

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

 

#26 — Kate Gulden, a suburban wife and mother dying of cancer.

JOHN: Here’s one true thing: Carl Franklin’s One True Thing is neither a Lifetime movie, an extended soap opera, nor a “chick-flick.” One True Thing is, in fact, a melodrama centered around a middle-aged woman dying of cancer, embellished with music and openly soliciting your tears. The maternal melodrama, a genre which Streep has revisited frequently, remains near the bottom of the genre totem pole, regularly maligned and dismissed by critics for all their attributes: it is proudly emotional, scored and scripted to produce waterworks, and an undisguised movie, unconcerned with presenting realism through its formal elements. One True Thing, like most contemporary maternal melodramas, is familiar and stylistically plain, and the film is admittedly hampered by a hackneyed framing device, but it also takes seriously issues central to women’s lives, exploring a mother-daughter relationship and issues of long-term marriage, especially the concessions made and female labor expended in keeping a household running smoothly. One True Thing deserves to be taken as seriously as Saving Private Ryan or any other masculine meditation on violence released in 1998. To immediately write off the film, and the genre to which it belongs, is to devalue and belittle the feminine concerns it explores...

Click to read more ...

Months of Meryl: Dancing at Lughnasa (1998)

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

 

#25 — Kate Mundy, the elder head of a matriarchal clan in Ireland’s County Donegal circa 1936.

MATTHEW: Dancing at Lughnasa continues the sporadic but prestigious practice, begun by Plenty and leading up to August: Osage County, of Meryl Streep headlining big-ticket Broadway plays in screen adaptations that tend to do a disservice to the often truncated works whose very suitability for such stage-to-cineplex transfers feels rather strained. (Angels in America, made for HBO, is obviously a highly distinguished exception.) These films are greenlit as glorified acting showcases in the hopes of magnetizing a similar haul of trophies as their acclaimed theatrical predecessors. They may feature some fine, forceful performances (from Streep and several others), but their claims as cinema remain dubious at best.

I’m always curious about why Streep seldom returns to her first love, the stage, especially when one considers that the actress’ greatest role in the last decade was not Susan Orlean, Clarissa Vaughan, or Miranda Priestley, but Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, whose wagon of wares Streep took up for a 2006 Shakespeare in the Park production, four years after playing Irina in The Seagull for the same summer series...

Click to read more ...

Months of Meryl: Marvin's Room (1996)

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...

Click to read more ...

Months of Meryl: Before and After (1996)

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

 

 #23 —Dr. Carolyn Ryan, a suburban pediatrician attempting to keep her family together after her son becomes a prime suspect in his girlfriend’s murder.

MATTHEW: In a 2000 Entertainment Weekly profile that took stock of her screen efforts to-date, Meryl Streep amusingly and very appropriately described Before and After, Barbet Schroeder’s 1996 small-town crime drama, as “an airless thing.” Truer words, etc.

Before and After is one of those forgettable Streep misfires that appear with a bit more frequency in the latter half of her vaunted career. The tell-tale signs are all here: an appealing but hardly virtuosic director seemingly working on autopilot, bestselling literary source material that maybe didn’t cry out for cinematic treatment after all, and a Northeastern setting in close enough proximity to her Connecticut domicile...

Click to read more ...