Word: streep
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...across this background--frameworks for passion and its absence that play off one another. Most attention falls on the Victorian drama, in which Christopher Irons plays an aristocratic dabbler at science, Charles Smithson, whose plans for marriage are torn apart by his vision of the haunting face of Meryl Streep at the end of a long sea wall, wind and waves crashing about her. Smithson spends the rest of the film trying to understand the reason for her remarkable, extraordinary look...
...whore") because she is said to have dallied with a visiting French officer--a scandalous reputation she encourages. Charles and Sarah fall into a curious kind of love. Their story is not merely a romance, but Romantic in the grand style. Pinter's second story shows Irons and Streep playing Mike and Anna, the two 20th-century leads having a back-stage affair...
...flame is too bright to ignore. Streep's not-quite-pretty face, which should have been just the object of Smithson's passion, becomes instead the most memorable thing in the film. Streep, almost by accident, takes over the stage whenever she enters. Irons is good--his aristocratic gentility and his moments of anger both stand out clearly--but he can't compare to Streep's magic. Streep, as the Scarlet Woman of Lyme Regis, has to convey an obscure, flighty vulnerability, always looking away from the camera and Smithson. And always she has at her disposal that piercing stare...
...Streep's performance as the present-day Anna is adequate in its bitchiness, but as the Victorian Sarah the actress comes into her own. Where Anna is predictably modern, Sarah has a hint of madness. The transformation between the two is captured in one of the film's best moments. Mike and Anna are wearing everyday clothes in their hotel room, rehearsing a scene in which Smithson comes upon Sarah with her skirt caught in a bush. They talk it through once--and then Streep does it, standing up and walking toward Irons. The costume doesn't matter: her eyes...
...Meryl Streep is an artist, not a celebrity [Sept. 7]. She doesn't play a part-she is the part. That's magic...