Months of Meryl: Postcards from the Edge (1990)

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

 

 #17 —Suzanne Vale, a recovering drug addict and B-list actress of royal Hollywood pedigree.

MATTHEW: It has always been impossible to escape the metatextual associations of Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge, which really means it has always been impossible to escape the shared history of two artists: Fisher and her famous mother, Debbie Reynolds, a relationship that is the very bedrock of Fisher’s 1987 novel and Mike Nichols’ subsequent screen adaptation. To watch the latter now, in a world without Fisher or Reynolds, is an experience of unavoidable and indescribable bittersweetness. It helps, however, that Fisher confronted even the most harrowing episodes of her lifelong addiction with a sly, battle-ready smirk and a tart tongue, which always ensured that she — and she alone — would get the last word. On the screen, Postcards from the Edge remains a salty, joyous, yet tough-minded immersion within the rocky recovery of its Fisher-like heroine, Suzanne Vale, and a prickly heartwarmer that continually confuses our inclinations towards laughter or tears.

This is largely because of Fisher, whose hysterical one-liners are an art form unto themselves. Consider, for a moment, that such gems as “Do you always talk in bumper stickers?” and “Instant gratification takes too long” and “What am I supposed to do, go to a halfway house for wayward SAG actors?” are all spoken within the first 20 minutes of the movie, and there are plenty more where those came from...

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Months of Meryl: She-Devil (1989)

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

#16 — Mary Fisher, a frivolous romance novelist who steals the husband of a dowdy housewife.

JOHN: For such a tepid and unruly film, She-Devil enjoys quite an outsized reputation. Considered by many to be the nadir of Streep’s early career and one of her worst performances, She-Devil is also a Streep turn that is often reblogged context-free online, which makes sense when one considers its outre, GIF-ready moments of ironic femininity and gaudy Real Housewives of Long Island aesthetic that some might consider ahead of its time. Having seen these images of Streep’s Mary Fisher before watching the film, I had anticipated fun kitsch or perhaps even smart camp. Roseanne’s film debut! Susan Seidelman with a budget! Meryl’s comedy vehicle to silence the critics! But these are promises that She-Devil most certainly does not keep...

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Months of Meryl: A Cry in the Dark (1988)

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

 #15 — Lindy Chamberlain, a New Zealand matriarch wrongfully convicted of her child’s murder.

MATTHEW: One evening in August 1980, Azaria Chamberlain, the two month-old daughter of New Zealander couple Michael and Lindy Chamberlain, was taken while the family was camping near Ayers Rock. She was never found again. Seconds before Azaria disappeared, Lindy claimed to have seen a dingo rummaging through the tent where her daughter lay sleeping, putting forth the soon-to-be-infamous story that a dingo had taken and perhaps eaten her baby. A seedy, sensationalist media frenzy ensued, with the Chamberlains’ faces splashed across the covers of obsessive tabloids and speculative segments of nightly news programs as many, including the Australian high court, viciously questioned the veracity of the family’s explanation.

None of Meryl Streep’s vehicles have entered the cultural lexicon with quite the same measure of gleefully ubiquitous parody that has surrounded and even overshadowed Fred Schepisi’s 1988 docudrama A Cry in the Dark, also titled — and released in Australia and New Zealand as — Evil Angels after the John Bryson true-crime bestseller that first chronicled the Chamberlain family’s legal ordeal. A Cry in the Dark’s devolution into little more than a widely-known (though often misquoted) punchline has proven to be both admittedly hilarious but also fairly odd, especially considering the gruesome events from which this gag originates...

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Months of Meryl: Ironweed (1987)

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

 #14 — Helen Archer, a dying homeless alcoholic.

JOHN: Behold, the most devastating sequel to Heartburn imaginable. Directed by Hector Babenco and adapted by William Kennedy from his own Pulitzer-winning novel, Ironweed follows Francis (Jack Nicholson) and Helen (Streep), two homeless drifters biding their time and eking out their lives in Depression-era Albany. At nearly two and a half hours long, Ironweed is a bleak, wrenching study of poverty with nary a promise of redemption in sight. We’re talking about a movie whose most uplifting and musical scene is chased with a crushing dose of hopeless reality, a movie in which dogs assail a woman’s frozen corpse outside a church, digging graves is considered a good day’s work, and ramshackle vagrants pray they drink enough liquor to die in their sleep. It’s a tough sell and an even tougher sit, but Ironweed features one of Streep’s most spellbinding transformations.

Helen Archer does not make her entrance for a good twenty minutes. First we watch Nicholson’s Francis dig graves, slug whiskey, and fecklessly address the headstone of his deceased infant son, who he dropped and killed in a drunken daze. In the basement of a church serving free hot meals for the homeless, Helen slips through the door, a regular who, after some time away, returns to more of the same, reuniting with her moribund companion Francis. Streep’s Helen is shrewd enough to get herself warm and fed, but something about Helen suggests that she isn’t entirely there; it’s almost as if she is suspended halfway between life and death, past and present.

Helen, who we will come to learn is a former singer and concert pianist, constantly recollects the glory of her dashed dreams with utmost clarity, as again Streep is able to conjure a memory so expressively that one believes it to be as true as fact...

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Months of Meryl: Heartburn (1986)

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

 

#13 — Rachel Samstad, a New York food writer who is seduced and betrayed by a tomcat D.C. columnist.

MATTHEW: The celebrated run of 80s-era films that cemented Meryl Streep as a master among screen actors is so overwhelmingly remembered for its cadre of self-sacrificing period heroines that it was only inevitable that Streep’s two comedic outings would recede into the background. Based on its critical reception alone, Streep’s 1989 Roseanne Barr match-up She-Devil, which we’ll get around to discussing soon, may very well deserve to be remembered as a curious career outlier — that is, if it deserves to be remembered at all. But what about Heartburn, the all-around more prestigious comic vehicle? The project marked Streep’s first reunion with her Silkwood director Mike Nichols and that film’s co-writer Nora Ephron, from whose thinly-veiled best-seller the film was adapted...

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