BAD & PLENTY
O'Brien, Tom
Screen BAD & PLENTY ELEGANT HYSTERIA THE ENDING of Plenty is the film's most brilliant touch. A young English agent (Meryl Strccp) who worked with the French Resistance stands breathing in...
...To make the film...
...The scene perfectly registers her desire, literally (or visually) not to come down...
...Miraculously...
...Momentarily, the rock star, Sting, supplies some genuine drama as a worker whose rugged good looks attract Streep into having a baby by him...
...The opening of the film documents Streep's excitement during her tour of duty in France...
...Hare has collaborated with Australian director Fred Schcpisi...
...John Gielgud — with typical aplomb playing a daffy but sweet British ambassador — is made to put up with one of Streep's tirades over Suez, despite the fact he has already resigned his post because of it...
...Hare says simply, "This is a film about spending one's whole life in dissent...
...made famous by Osbome...
...Additional comic relief is supplied by a bohemian (Tracey Ullman) who assists Streep in her self-realization by supplying pot...
...it's about elegant hysteria...
...Tew bad Hare, like Strccp, gets rid of him...
...She has fire and flint, as anyone who saw Eye of The Needle (1981) can witness, and as Eleni, a December release about a heroine of the Greek civil wars, will probably attest...
...But Nelligan might have given the early scenes the authority they need...
...Played this way, Streep never seems to have had ideals to lose...
...She manages to stay calm awhile, it seems, only to enjoy more the fun of shattering whatever peace that she, or anyone with whom she is associated, has come to attain...
...In tragedy she resorts to mannerisms, and at heroism she's out of her depth...
...She played the role on Broadway, and was offered the film part after Streep initially turned it down...
...In over two hours, only one person ever challenges Streep and tells her where to get off...
...The hill descends from left to right, the natural way we read a shot, providing us a visual suggestion of an open world of endless possibilities that matches Streep's joyous intoxication...
...Her wanderings are projected against the backdrop of English society, first impoverished in the lean late forties, then stirred by a boom period of fifties "plenty," jolted in 1956 by Suez, and finally reverting to a drab conformity...
...According to playwright David Hare, Plenty is about "lost ideals...
...Plenty's end, to use film parlance, is "open...
...For one brief shining moment...
...The ending also points up the irony of Plenty...
...A young English agent (Meryl Strccp) who worked with the French Resistance stands breathing in sparkling fresh morning air on a Normandy hillside just at the end of World War II...
...Kramer describing how she "found herself in therapy in California...
...Fortunately, someone finally calls Streep's bluff and restores electricity to a predictable plot...
...Streep also claims that Plenty has a feminist element, and that much is certainly true: in her character we watch a new version of the fifties "angry young man...
...After her underground service, Streep is seen adjusting with difficulty to postwar life, getting and quitting several jobs, falling in and out of love and marriage with a British diplomat, and never really settling down...
...Plenty's plot covers twenty years...
...Kate Nelligan...
...He seems to equate her tantrums with sincerity...
...In film, with all her nervousness, she has struck gold only once, with Sophie's Choice, and there perhaps her best line was a comic malapropism on a searsucker suit...
...But the middle details how she lost the zest, the fresh air of that morning, once she "came down" to postwar reality...
...Unfortunately, Hare doesn't present his "angry young woman" ironically...
...In truth, another actress was available...
...But the war scenes degenerate quickly, with Streep resorting to some typical nervous gestures when encountering another English agent (Sam Ncill...
...MacKellen is at lea table to throw Streep back momentarily — before she resort to another tantrum...
...Moreover, she says nothing about why she's there, why she fought — except in a later anniversary television interview where she sounds about as convincing as she did in Kramer vs...
...Perhaps Plenty might have worked if its opening gave a deeper sense of how the war molded Strecp's character...
...Plenty isn't about "lost ideals" or dissenting...
...He may have intended some parallels with Molierc's The Misanthrope, and its portrayal of honest anger against hypocrisy...
...The answer, from her antics, is obvious But Strccp corners the chief diplomat there, played superbly by Ian MacKcllen...
...Of the new work...
...There arc so many things I want to change," Streep claims at one point, "and I don't know how...
...Strccp never shows much idealism about changing things in her postwar life — unless Hare wants us to think, at this late date, that having a baby by a man she doesn't know, or walking out on her job as an ad executive during an unsuccessful dog food commercial, are really strong or original symbols of dissent...
...Near the end, Streep pursues answers at the Foreign Office regarding why her husband's career is blocked...
...The result is sheer tedium...
...Hare addresses the issues of sincerity and conformity ambiguously, as Molicre might...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...War makes people nervous, to be sure, and needy...
...It's called diplomacy...
...she abandons him when he makes the mistake of loving her...
...The biggest wimp is her husband (Charles Dance, from A Jewel in the Crown), an urbane foreign service officer who, we arc supposed to believe, is so chivalrous that he marries her despite her hysteria and determines to save her even after she...
...An actress of more secure tragic gifts might have conveyed something deeper in these scenes...
...a. student of outsiders in such films as The Iceman and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith...
...and then going on to a tremulous one-night stand with him...
...The core problem with Strccp's character isn't merely that her fierceness lacks any constructive clement, but that watching her destroy things becomes boring much too quickly...
...Streep shows no signs of aging during Plenty's score of years...
...quite efficaciously, wrecks his career...
...but its middle, its real story, is one of confinement and how to deal with it...
...I found myself cheering a bureaucrat...
...Meryl Streep supposedly fits the bill for some people...
...She's the ultimate Designer Actress, she has a Yale imprint, and in Plenty she even comes equipped with an F.nglish accent...
...Yet her inability to grow crow's feet is the least of the film's problems...
...The producers went with Streep for obvious box office reasons There's an apparently unquenchable need in our age of cultural boom for lofty icons...
...Her natural gift is humor...
...But Plenty never escapes its English setting, nor Hare's roots in Osbome's and Pinter's assaults on the stuffy falseness of British class society...
...Hare never provides a convincing demonstration of what ideals Streep had during World War II, nor what he means when he says that she spent her "whole life in dissent...
...When Streep reconsidered, Neilligan was dropped (so much for sincerity and authenticity...
...we don't need postwar proof of that...
...More importantly...
...Plenty, despite its origin in theater, is extremely undramatic...
...the ideals that Strcep is supposed to possess during the war and adhere to fitfully afterward...
...MacKcllen answers...
...Without interior conflict, Plenty lacks external conflict as well...
...As Strccp gets frustrated at his polite evasions, she finally blurts, "How can you live forever not saying what you mean...
...Unfortunately — both for moral and dramatic reasons — she experiences little conflict over this...
...But in fact Streep has abandoned her real gift — for comedy — which made her theatrical name...
...It's one thing to wrestle with demons, or to be overwhelmed by them — or even to give in...
...When a fanner beckons her to his cottage below for some breakfast, it takes her several minutes to follow...
...It opens promisingly, with a picturesque freeze frame of Streep on a secret operation in France...
...For once in my life...
...But Strcep's character is unbelievable, and unadmirable, because she's already hysterical and maladjusted...
...It's another thing to lasciviate with them, and celebrate the pleasure therein as some sort of measure of heroic worth...
...But what we get arc simplistic counter-cultural associations of madness and heroism...
...Streep has said that her role in Plenty made her feel parallels to her own experiences ranging from American college life in the late sixties to the "big chill" today...
...Her key line doesn't involve a desire to change things without knowing how, but is a smiling, almost lewd confession that "I like to lose control...
...Commonweal: 582 straightfaccd, "It's my job...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 18
