Streeping

Recently, over on The Film Experience, there was a reader ranking of Meryl Streep’s Oscar nominated performances, excluding her most recent work in The Iron Lady. I had seen 13 of the 16 roles, and I meant to email my rankings in, but I forgot. Anyway, because I LOVE Meryl Streep and because I love making lists, I thought I would watch all sixteen performances in chronological order, discuss my thoughts, and then at the end post my ranking here. This would also give me a chance to catch the ones I’ve missed and see many for the second time.

Her first two nominated performances (and first win!) were for 1978’s The Deer Hunter and 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer—both films won Best Picture. I had only seen these films once before, in college, so I was ready to see them again. Here are my thoughts on the films and on Her Streepness.

The Deer Hunter is an epic that clocks in at just over three hours. Setting aside three hours in a day to watch a film is one thing, but that doesn't matter if the film is excellent. Despite the prestige for the film, it’s left me a bit cold both times. Robert De Niro is young and quite dashing and gives a riveting performance that kept me watching. Everyone talks about the elaborate Russian Orthodox wedding set piece which takes up approximately half an hour of screen time. It is stunning. Aside from Meryl Streep, the first time I watched the film was to see the infamous Russian roulette scene. Most people will note that there is no factual evidence for Russian roulette taking place in Vietnam. In fact, its conception was from an earlier, discarded script set in Las Vegas called “The Man Who Came to Play.” Rather, the film uses Russian roulette as a metaphor for the Vietnam War—sending young men off to uncertain fates—and while the film seems more anti than pro war, its politics are difficult to ascertain and what are we to make of the closing scene where the characters sing “God Bless America?" The film also has detractors citing it as a racist hate film. This is a charge I didn’t understand the first time I watched it. Filmed in Thailand with Thais playing the Vietnamese, Vanity Fair’s Peter Biskind writes, “The Deer Hunter, on the other hand, has few scruples about killing Vietnamese; the sadistic, cackling monkeys with dollar bills clutched in their paws deserve what they get. What the film doesn’t like is Vietnamese killing white American males and exposing them to emotional and physical trauma like Russian roulette." Ah, now I understand. It should be noted, for better or worse, that the filmmakers were focused on the relationship of the friends and that the Vietnam War merely provided a testing ground to explore those bonds. It was considered more of a domestic drama than a war movie thus playing fast and loose with historical facts and ignoring the wider social context of the war to focus on the main characters and their hometown community.

So what about Meryl Streep? She is the main reason I watched this film both times. This was more or less her first major film role after a bit part in Julia and a role in the TV miniseries Holocaust (and some other stuff). In The Deer Hunter Streep plays Linda but her character feels so minor that I could barely remember her name. The maid of honor to Angela the bride, Streep is introduced wearing her bridesmaid’s dress and taking care of her alcoholic and abusive father who is cursing all the bitches in the world and who strikes her. This seems to serve little purpose other than that Linda decides to leave her father’s house and sublet Nick and Michael’s place while they’re in Vietnam. It also elicits the “morass of homoeroticism and misogyny which [the film] evokes but refuses to explore” (Biskind). I would personally argue that the bonds are more homosocial than homoerotic. Anyway, Streep’s Linda makes eyes at De Niro’s Michael during the wedding but she dances with Nick (Christopher Walken) and when she catches the bouquet, Nick asks her to marry him and she says yes. When Michael returns from Vietnam, sans Nick, he and Linda begin an affair. Her role is little more than “the girlfriend” and seems slight for an Oscar nomination. Still, there she is on screen, fully formed and beautiful, Meryl Streep, nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a prestige picture that won five out of nine Academy Awards including Best Picture. She even sings!

Among Film Experience readers, this role placed 12th. Nathaniel R. writes, “In the grand scheme of Streep's Filmography this role as a small town girl left by men going to war one is a mere lovely introduction…” It will probably place near the bottom of my own ranking owing to the smallness of the role and my personal indifference to the film as a whole.

The next year, Meryl Streep had a supporting role in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (also as an ex-wife and parent) and won the Oscar (Best Supporting Actress) for her work in Kramer vs. Kramer. I was delighted by this film both times, finding it to be a warm and absorbing domestic drama. Joanna Kramer is a deeply unhappy woman whose identity has been subsumed as wife and mother. At the beginning of the film she leaves her husband, Ted (Dustin Hoffman), a workaholic Mad Man—the less WASPy, less unfaithful, ‘70s successor of Don Draper. As the sole parent of their six-year-old son Billy, he now has to earn the bacon and cook it too. Though he is easily frustrated in his new role, he works hard a being a good father. However, his performance at work suffers, and he is let go. At the same time, just as he is developing a rhythm for himself and his son, Joanna returns, suing for custody. Her reappearance is deeply sinister, appearing as she does, hand pressed against the glass of a coffee shop in the background, watching from afar as Ted drops off Billy at school. Although she has been presented as the bad guy, the one who left her marriage and her child, she is deeply affecting as a lost woman who still loves her child and wants custody. “I’m his mother. I’m his mother” she repeats on the stand at the custody hearing.

It’s a small but quiet and heart-wrenching role. It placed 6th in the ranking. Nathaniel R. writes, “It became the top grossing film of 1979, it's title shorthand for divorce it so captured the zeitgeist. It is one of those best pictures that people sometimes complain about since it beat not one but two bonafide auteurial masterworks (Apocalypse Now and All That Jazz) but damn if this isn't still a remarkably potent affecting drama.”

Next up: The French Lieutenant's Woman and Sophie's Choice.