Months of Meryl: The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

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

#22 — Francesca Johnson, an Italian war bride-turned-American housewife who falls in love with a visiting photographer.

JOHN: Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) is sipping a beer in a bathtub while a charming stranger waits for her to eat dinner downstairs. Francesca’s husband and two children have left for a trip to the Iowa state fair, but her few days of solitude have been quickly interrupted by the welcome arrival of Clint Eastwood’s Robert Kincaid, a travelling National Geographic photographer on assignment to shoot Madison’s quaint covered bridges. With her brunette bangs and stray wisps of hair dangling out from her updo, Streep lounges in the bath, watching the water from the shower head above drip down into her hands. Robert has just showered, and, in voiceover, Francesca relates the eroticism of the moment, their sharing the bathtub only minutes apart. Streep’s face has never looked more assured and aroused, even as she’s unsettled by the seismic consequences of this romance. The simultaneous thrill and troubling implications of the moment flicker on Streep’s face as she loses herself in thought, already foreseeing the end of this brief encounter while testing the boundaries between her desires and responsibilities.

In this scene, the magnificence of Streep’s performance elevates this admittedly soapy and conventional tale into the pantheon, a brilliant fusion of Francesca’s subjectivity given weight by a generous filmmaker and imbued with soul-shaking truth by a master performer...

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Months of Meryl: The River Wild (1994)

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

 

 #21 —Gail Hartman, a rafting expert whose distracted husband and disgruntled son will soon turn out to be the least of her problems…

MATTHEW: The River Wild opens with the rather surprising sight of Meryl Streep rowing a kayak with steely determination and brisk athletic prowess down the lengthy expanse of the Charles River. Watching Curtis Hanson’s waterborne caper for the first time in 2018, I asked myself with stunned curiosity the same question that surely rolled through the minds of ‘90s audiences upon the film’s release: How exactly did she get here? The River Wild is a light rip-roarer that could have easily ended up as little more than a forgettable IMDB entry in the filmography of Sigourney Weaver or Geena Davis or Linda Hamilton were it not for someone’s out-of-the-box idea to transform one of our most famously worldly and erudite thespians into a hard-bodied, take-charge action heroine...

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Months of Meryl: The House of the Spirits (1993)

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

#20 —Clara del Valle Trueba, paranormal matriarch of a prosperous South American family.

JOHN: Yes, paranormal. But please, take your expectations about Meryl Streep as psychic (and Glenn Close as her scorned, sexually repressed sister-in-law) that may be levitating midair and place them firmly on the ground. Actually, go ahead and place them below the Earth’s surface, and then you might be ready to endure one of the absolute worst films Streep has ever been caught in. The House of the Spirits, an adaptation of Isabel Allende’s titular novel, chronicles the tumultuous history of the Trueba family, a prosperous South American dynasty headed by Esteban Trueba (Jeremy Irons), a peasant turned plantation owner turned conservative senator, who marries Clara del Valle (Streep), the youngest daughter of a wealthy, liberal family, and did I mention that she can move things with her mind and predict the future?

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Months of Meryl: Death Becomes Her (1992)

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...

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Months of Meryl: Defending Your Life (1991)

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

#18 —Julia, a quality human being awaiting her judgment in the afterlife.

JOHN: Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks’ 1991 purgatory comedy, actually contains two movies. One involves Brooks’ Daniel Miller dying in a car accident, arriving in the leisurely Judgment City, and having his entire life reviewed in a trial that will determine whether he is reincarnated as a different person or sent to a higher dimension. The other, shorter film lodged inside Brooks’ painfully vain lark is about the absolute perfection of Meryl Streep. Guess which one is more enjoyable...

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