Meryl Streep is undoubtedly one of the greatest screen actresses of all time, but I sometimes wish that her talent for acting were matched by a talent for picking the right film. Although she never gives a bad performance, and rarely a mediocre one, she has found herself appearing in some mediocre films. Even in the eighties, probably the best decade of her career, she tended to alternate between the excellent ("The French Lieutenant's Woman", "Sophie's Choice", "Silkwood", "Out of Africa", "A Cry in the Dark") and the not-so-good. A romance between Streep and Robert de Niro, for example, might have seemed like an excellent premise for a film, but "Falling in Love" turned out a great disappointment.
"Plenty" is another of Streep's less successful ventures from this decade, although this British art-house movie did at least show more ambition than the typically bland Hollywood fare of "Falling in Love". The film is based on a stage play by the left-wing playwright David Hare. Streep plays the main character, Susan Traherne, an upper-class young Englishwoman who during World War II works as an underground courier in Nazi-occupied France. The work is dangerous, but the idealistic Susan, who is firmly convinced that she is fighting for a better world, finds it exhilarating. She has a passionate affair with Lazar, a British agent. There is a key scene, set at the end of the war, where Susan stands on a hilltop in beautiful French countryside, bathed in golden sunlight, and says, "There will be days and days and days like this." That scene on the hill is a flashback- in fact it is the last shot in the film. By this time we have already learnt that the post-war years have turned out to be far less rosy than Susan imagined. Nothing in her peacetime life can ever be as thrilling, or as fulfilling, as her wartime experiences. Her jobs as a shipping clerk and in advertising provide her with no satisfaction. She has an unsatisfactory affair with the working-class Mick and a disastrous marriage to Raymond Brock, a career diplomat. She tries to rekindle her affair with Lazar, but cannot recapture their wartime passion. She always lives under the shadow of depression and mental instability.
David Hare wrote about the film that it was called "Plenty" because it depicts the way in which "the years of austerity in the late forties are followed by the years of plenty in the mid-fifties, and it's a recurring feeling in the film that it is money that rots people". This could have been an interesting theme- the contrast between the idealism of the forties and the complacent materialism of the fifties- but it never really comes through in the film. Indeed, some commentators have seen quite the opposite message in the film, which they interpret as showing how wartime hopes of greater material prosperity for the working class were to be disappointed in the fifties. This message, however, does not really come through either. There is not much in the film about either middle-class wealth or working-class poverty; much of the film's most overtly political content concerns the Suez crisis of 1956.
There are attempts to draw analogies between the personal lives of the characters and the wider society of which they are a part, but the film is really about Susan and her fragile personality. She comes across as an incredibly selfish and self-centred individual; what worries her is not the state of British society or the lot of the working class but rather the fact that her own life is not as exciting as it once was. The collapse of her marriage to Raymond results from the fact that it is her increasingly eccentric behaviour which has damaged his career and her refusal to live abroad which has prevented him from being offered foreign postings.
There are some good acting performances in the film, but they mostly come in cameo roles, such as John Gielgud as Sir Leonard Darwin, the Foreign Office mandarin who resigns over Suez, or Ian McKellen as Sir Andrew Charleson, the urbane and supercilious diplomat who succeeds Darwin as Raymond's superior, or Tracey Ullman as Susan's friend Alice. Streep's own performance is technically good- her English accent is flawless, even better than in "The French Lieutenant's Woman"- but she never succeeds in arousing our sympathy for her self-obsessed character. "Plenty" could have been an interesting study of British society during and after World War II, but ends up as a cold, uninvolving character study of a neurotic woman. 5/10
"Plenty" is another of Streep's less successful ventures from this decade, although this British art-house movie did at least show more ambition than the typically bland Hollywood fare of "Falling in Love". The film is based on a stage play by the left-wing playwright David Hare. Streep plays the main character, Susan Traherne, an upper-class young Englishwoman who during World War II works as an underground courier in Nazi-occupied France. The work is dangerous, but the idealistic Susan, who is firmly convinced that she is fighting for a better world, finds it exhilarating. She has a passionate affair with Lazar, a British agent. There is a key scene, set at the end of the war, where Susan stands on a hilltop in beautiful French countryside, bathed in golden sunlight, and says, "There will be days and days and days like this." That scene on the hill is a flashback- in fact it is the last shot in the film. By this time we have already learnt that the post-war years have turned out to be far less rosy than Susan imagined. Nothing in her peacetime life can ever be as thrilling, or as fulfilling, as her wartime experiences. Her jobs as a shipping clerk and in advertising provide her with no satisfaction. She has an unsatisfactory affair with the working-class Mick and a disastrous marriage to Raymond Brock, a career diplomat. She tries to rekindle her affair with Lazar, but cannot recapture their wartime passion. She always lives under the shadow of depression and mental instability.
David Hare wrote about the film that it was called "Plenty" because it depicts the way in which "the years of austerity in the late forties are followed by the years of plenty in the mid-fifties, and it's a recurring feeling in the film that it is money that rots people". This could have been an interesting theme- the contrast between the idealism of the forties and the complacent materialism of the fifties- but it never really comes through in the film. Indeed, some commentators have seen quite the opposite message in the film, which they interpret as showing how wartime hopes of greater material prosperity for the working class were to be disappointed in the fifties. This message, however, does not really come through either. There is not much in the film about either middle-class wealth or working-class poverty; much of the film's most overtly political content concerns the Suez crisis of 1956.
There are attempts to draw analogies between the personal lives of the characters and the wider society of which they are a part, but the film is really about Susan and her fragile personality. She comes across as an incredibly selfish and self-centred individual; what worries her is not the state of British society or the lot of the working class but rather the fact that her own life is not as exciting as it once was. The collapse of her marriage to Raymond results from the fact that it is her increasingly eccentric behaviour which has damaged his career and her refusal to live abroad which has prevented him from being offered foreign postings.
There are some good acting performances in the film, but they mostly come in cameo roles, such as John Gielgud as Sir Leonard Darwin, the Foreign Office mandarin who resigns over Suez, or Ian McKellen as Sir Andrew Charleson, the urbane and supercilious diplomat who succeeds Darwin as Raymond's superior, or Tracey Ullman as Susan's friend Alice. Streep's own performance is technically good- her English accent is flawless, even better than in "The French Lieutenant's Woman"- but she never succeeds in arousing our sympathy for her self-obsessed character. "Plenty" could have been an interesting study of British society during and after World War II, but ends up as a cold, uninvolving character study of a neurotic woman. 5/10