It’s Mother’s Days, so what better film to cover than “Postcards from the Edge”, Mike Nichols’ 1990 drama comedy of a disfunctional mother-daughter relationship. New DVD screencaptures from the film have been added to the image library, three clips from the film can be found in the video archive – with a bonus clip of Meryl performing “I’m Checking Out“. Also, be sure to have a look at this 1991 segment from E! Entertainment, featuring an interview with Meryl and on-set footage from the film. Production notes and my review after the cut. As always, share your thoughts on “Postcards from the Edge” in the comments.

Production Notes

All of her life, Suzanne Vale has been Doris Mann’s daughter, a big movie star’s daughter,” explains Streep, “and this is the story of her shaking off that Doris mantle and coming out and becoming herself at last. I think it’s a really interesting story, not just for movie stars with progeny in the business, but for anybody who’s got an indelible character for a mother or father.” “What attracted me to this project,” observes MacLaine, “was not only the mother-daughter aspect – because, God knows, I’ve done those before – but the fact that this was also a picture that for the first time told a really sensitive and authentic story of the pressures of Hollywood. Doris offered me the opportunity to play an aging woman who still looks beautiful and allowed me to recall all the feelings that I had as a mother, wondering whether I was overshadowing my daughter.” “There were three factors that attracted me to this film,” recalls Nichols. “I always thought that Carrie approached a lugubrious subject with energy and humor and vitality; comedy is a good way to get at something that you can’t necessarily examine in a serious approach. And when drugs and alcohol in the upper-middle class are approached too soberly, it comes out like afternoon television. “I have always found it interesting to consider the relationships of women and their mothers,” he continues. “And finally, everyone has a fascination with show people and with show business. Movie people are maybe the last royalty – although there’s nothing royal about them – and people love to read and hear about them. And I just wanted to explore this alien world – which has always seemed very funny to me, with its own customs and own laws, both written and unwritten, and its own politics – in a way that might show audiences that all lives are similar.” With Nichols committed to direct “Postcards From the Edge” and Streep – who had worked twice before with Nichols (on “Silkwood” and “Heartburn”) agreeing to star in the film, the project took on a life of its own, attracting an impressive collection of first-rate actors. “Mike Nichols’ great gift is that people want to work with him, so once he and Meryl were on board it was like giving a party – let’s say a party in honor of Meryl and Mike. Who’s not going to come? Well, everybody came,” recalls Fisher.

The first movie I made in California was “Postcards From the Edge”, and we were all sitting around at lunch, and Shirley MacLaine said, “Meryl, how do you like California?” And I said: “You know, I feel sort of guilty, but I love it. I love it, I don’t why. It has flowers all the time. I love it – the only thing is, I’m a little bit scared of the earthquakes,” and everybody laughed uproariously. And Shirley looked at me very seriously, and she said, “How long do you plan on being out here?” And I said, “I don’t know maybe two years at the most.” And she said, “Well, you’re all right, because there’s not going to be a major earthquake until the winter of 1994.” And the day after this thing (the earthquake in 1994), I woke up in a sweat because I remembered that she said this, and I saw her at this event, and I ran up to her and said, “Shirley, do you remember that you said that?” She said: “Of course. But I moved, and you didn’t.” [Laughs] I said, “OK, when’s the next one? It’s such a shock to see that movie! When I was making it, I thought, I’m so fat, I’m too old to do this… I mean, look at all these great women who were in that film. Shirley MacLaine looks incredible and Annette Bening had this great, sexy part. But now I watch it and think, Geez, what were you whining about? (Meryl Streep, US Weekly, October 1994, Good Housekeeping, January 2003)

“I remember that I was beside myself with fear and anxiety at the first reading,” recalls Streep. “One of the reasons I took this part was because I’m so afraid of singing in front of people, and this role was a way to explore my own insecurities about myself.” “At the first reading, we sat around a big table with all the cast – and it is such a formidable cast and Shirley Macl.aine is so larger-than-life a personality that I didn’t have to work hard to feel like I was in her shadow .- and when it came time to get up and sing, my knees were just going a mile a minute and my upper lip was uncontrollable. I found that I didn’t have to work hard to be nervous about singing in front of all these people,” Streep explains. “There were other things about this project that appealed to me in addition to having the opportunity to sing on screen,” she adds. ”This was a character who sounded more like me than other things I’ve done, and it was a role I could slip into with less effort than some I’ve done. The script also offered a nice balance of comedy to drama.” To prepare for this role, Streep spent some time at a drug rehab clinic and attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. She also spent a lot of time with Carrie Fisher. “I didn’t really have to pick Carrie’s brain,” Streep says. “She’s like a volcano -she erupts. I liked her immediately, and I didn’t hang around her to ‘get’ the character; I liked her as a friend.”

She’s the best version of me I’ve ever seen; I wish she could do it all the time. I had to explain to her what drugs are like because she hadn’t really done that. (But) I do that very well; I have a lot of practice. I didn’t know that it was going to turn out to be helping Meryl as research; that’s probably what I did it for – as research for Meryl. I had to teach her to be a truant, like a bad girl. I had to teach Meryl bad behavior – and anybody who wants that kind of training, that’s my specialty. She understood the notion of it very well. It’s ridiculous what she can do, and I think she thinks it’s ridiculous, too. She’s not just this goddess, or I couldn’t hang around with her. That’d be awful, if she was this queen of acting and accents. I don’t think she gets too far into character that she can’t crawl out easily. (Carrie Fisher, The Hollywood Reporter, June 2004)

“Shirley is a star in the sense of the people who are accustomed to being stars,” observes Streep. “She’s a person who knows how to be on and when to turn off. She’s very electric – she throws a lot of power in her performance. And she made my work a little easier because I was supposed to be a little dimmer as a personality. As Suzanne, my task was to be in her shadow, and Shirley casts a long one.” Even during rehearsals, Nichols lived up to his reputation as an actor’s director, which continued once production on the film began. “This was my third movie with Mike directing,” says Streep, “and the more he knows me, the more he demands of me, so the experience of working with him on ‘Postcards’ was worse in a good way. Mike is demanding, but he doesn’t have tunnel vision. People can come in with ideas, and if he doesn’t like them he rejects them in a most diplomatic way. Mike is great, and he’s very funny on the set. Even when he’s angry, his wit sharpens and he’s very amusing.” “Mike is the best because of his sense of detail and his sense of emotional sophistication,” adds MacLaine. “On the set, I was very aware that I was in Mike’s world. But I like to adapt to different worlds and other people’s creative talents, and I don’t see how I could have entered a world that was more evolved creatively than Mike’s.” What happens to Suzanne in the course of the story is what happens to most people who mature. You learn that you have to forgive your parents for your own sake as well as for their sake, and parents learn that they have to forgive their children, because – after all – children hurt parents just as much as parents hurt children. As we know, the only thing that can allow you to be free and live your life is to forgive on both ends. “To draw that story through these very colorful and – in some cases, like in the musical numbers – very flashy events while always staying clear about exactly where we were in the story at any given time was a real challenge for me,” Nichols continues. “Finally, I wanted to suggest that show people are both more like ordinary people than the audience generally realizes, and also less. They’re stranger. But they’ve got another kind of courage and they’ve got a lot humor and a strong will to survive both in life and in show business. And, in fact, all lives are similar.” But as Suzanne Vale – a second-generation member in good standing of Hollywood “royalty” – explains to one “civilian” in “Postcards From the Edge,” “We’re designed more for public than for private.”

Frederik’s Review

“Postcards” lives from Carrie Fisher’s brilliant writing, making it a quoteable film. Suzanne – “designed to be annoyed” – is not a character you would associate with Fisher at once – at least I’ve never watched this film as a biopic on Fisher’s life. Rather, it’s a sharp look at the film industry, the way actors are treated on their way down, but mostly a portrait of a very disfunctional mother-daughter relationship within the machinery of Hollywood. The acting of Streep and MacLaine is outstanding, as is the rest of the cast. The film bursts of great actors in supporting roles and cameos – Gene Hackman as Suzanne’s director, Rob Reiner as her producer, Richard Dreyfuss as the doctor, from Dennis Quaid, Simon Callow and Oliver Platt to Anthony Heald and Annette Bening, all actors are featured in small but great roles. They and of course Streep and MacLaine make this a movie to be recommended. The aspect I’ve enjoyed probably most of the film is the portrait of an older actress struggling with her life. Usually with a storyline like this, you expect a twenty-something year-old actress – just as we are used to from today’s celebrities and tabloids. But having a middle-aged actress struggling with drugs and a fading career is a reminder that addiction is not a question of age. Also, no matter how old you are, if you still have parents you will always be a child. Both topics are wonderfully observed in “Postcards”. I’d rank this performance among Streep’s best. She deserved her Oscar nomination for playing Suzanne – although Kathy Bates was a fair winner for “Misery”, given the fact that also Anjelica Huston gave a career-best performance in “The Grifters” and 1991 has been a crowded place with many fantastic performances that year, it’s nice to see Meryl on the list anyway. Another fantastic Mike Nichols film.

This week’s spotlight covers “She-Devil”, Susan Seidelman’s 1989 comedy about a frumpy housewives revenge after being left by her husband for a beautiful, rich author. New DVD screencaptures from the film have been added to the image library, as well as three video clips from the film. Production notes and my review can be found after the cut. As always, please share your thoughts about the film in the comments. Enjoy your Sunday!

Production Notes

“She-Devil” is based on Fay Weldon’s 1983 novel “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil” about a highly unattractive woman who goes to great lengths to take revenge on her husband and his attractive lover. It served for a 1986 BBC mini-series before being adapted by Hollywood. For a while, Meryl Streep considered taking the part of Ruth Patchett herself; she was one of the first actresses to read the script, because she and director Susan Seidelman shared the same agent, Sam Cohn. “He wanted her for Ruth, but I was hoping she’d be Mary,” said Seidelman. “When he called me to say, she’d do it, I didn’t know which part he meant. I dind’t want an actress who had her clothing stuffed, or had to gain weight. I mean, the thing about Roseanne is that she’s not playing a fat person.” Meryl passed on Ruth because she felt she had dealt with that subject in her previous film “A Cry in the Dark”.

Instead, Streep felt she could do her bit to debunk the ideal by turning Mary Fisher into a caricature of femininity. Here she’s given a juicy role to sink her teeth into: Mary Fisher, the best-selling romance novelist who seems like what would happen if the genes of Barbara Cartland, Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel were combined in the same trash compactor. It’s a role that calls out for broad, fearless interpretation, and Streep has a lot of fun with it. Everything about her is pink, from the perfectly manicured nails to her frilly, flouncy wardrobe – even her maison by the sea. “I thout I was going way, way, way out on a limb with this character,” says Streep. “Meanwhile, I hadn’t turned on the television for a while. The way I look in this movie, as outrageous as I think I look, I look like everybody on TV. And these are the models that our little girls watch. I mean, it’s back to Barbie dolls, basically.” At the time, Barr had been reading scripts in search of one she considered appropriate for making her feature debut. “I got a lot of stuff where the woman’s happy ’cause she lost weight or she got the guy, and it just seemed really demeaning and degraing. I wanted something with some kind of soulful thing of upheaval and truth-telling.”

I’ve only worked with one female director and that was Susan Seidelman. It wasn’t a successful experience. She was eight months pregnant during the shoot and didn’t know it. Excuse me! She was not as in touch with her female side as maybe some of the men that I’ve worked with [laughs]. Literally eight months pregnant. And she said, “Well, I went to the doctor and…” Well, I think she thought she had a tumor – she thought she was dying. At any rate, she’d had a negative test – I’d say, “Go get another opinion.” They can sometimes be wrong. From experience. (Meryl Streep, US Weekly, October 1994)

There must have been moments on the set of “She-Devil” where Roseanne Barr went into her dressing room and locked the door and asked herself what she was doing there, co-starring in a movie with the immortal Meryl Streep. We’re in on the amazement, because Barr has done such a thorough job of documenting her life in comedy routines, in confessional interviews, in her book and on talk shows. Here is a woman who only a few years ago couldn’t have gotten an autograph from Meryl Streep, let alone steal a scene from her, writes Roger Ebert in his review on the comedy. And Time Magazine wrote, “Watching Meryl Streep as Mary Fisher, romance novelist, is like seeing Margaret Thatcher play the horse in a Christmas pantomime – and with delicious style. The great gray lady of movie drama brings her precise acting tools to a comedy of manners, flouncing wittily onto a couch, exhaling every word in swooning intimacy, switching from fawn to fume in the wink of a lover’s indiscretion. She can even speak American English without an accent. Surprise!” While “She-Devil” opened to mixed reviews, Meryl Streep would score a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy (her career’s first) in 1990.

Frederik’s Review

“She-Devil” wasn’t very successful upon its release, but if you take it as it is – a light comedy – it’s very entertaining. Critics were dismissing Roseanne Barr back then for not being able to carry a feature film with her acting abilities. But since Roseanne rose to fame for basically playing herself, first in stand-up, then on her own television show, no one can really blame her for not being Meryl Streep. Especially when you have Meryl Streep in the film already. Looking at the parts that Meryl has played in the years before, from Karen Blixen to Lindy Chamberlain, Mary Fisher doesn’t really stand in line with these great characters at first sight – all blonde and pink, she barely raises her voice – probably because she never had to. She’s the villain in the film as it’s about Roseanne’s path of revenge, but you can’t help but enjoy the Streep character throughout the film’s story. For the first time, Meryl got a chance to show her masterful comic timing. Even after having it watched a couple of times, you still find some little details in her mimic and characterization that you haven’t noticed before. You can tell she was having fun with this role. “She-Devil” came at a time in Meryl’s career when the “good roles” were getting less. As she said in an interview, “I remember when I turned 40, I was offered, within one year, three different witch roles. It was almost like the studios were saying, ‘We don’t know what to do with you.’” Seen in this context, I think Meryl wanted to show a different side of herself, within the offers she received, and with “She-Devil” she has succeeded to keep her versatility. Recommended to everybody who enjoys a light comedy.

The movie of the week comes a day earlier this time and will be covered on Sundays from now on. This week it’s “Adaptation”, an important role in Meryl’s career since it literally gave her on-screen legacy a second prime in 2002 – and a thirteenth Oscar nomination. The image library has been updated with DVD screencaptures, three new clips have been added to the video archive (trailers and interviews have been re-added in better quality). As always, production notes and review below. Please let me know what you think of “Adaptation” in the comments.

Production Notes
In 1999, just as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich was being brought to the screen by director Spike Jonze, he had been commissioned by Jonathan Demme and his producing partner Ed Saxon, to adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s best-selling non-fiction book The Orchid Thief. The book is a widely praised tale of a journalist who discovers the roots of her own passion while chronicling the adventures of John Laroche, a man who is obsessed with his love for rare orchids. “I remember being cocky and thinking, yeah, I like this. I can turn this into a movie.” However, when he was unable to conceive of a suitable way to shape the material into a narrative screenplay, his self-confidence soon turned into depression. Throughout the torturous process, Kaufman remained steadfast in his commitment of finding a way to address the theme of passion. Kaufman took a radical approach to adapting The Orchid Thief. Producer Ed Saxon was suspicious when receiving the first draft. “That wasn’t the title of the book we had optioned. And then it said ‘written by Charlie and Donald Kaufman.’ And I thought, ‘who is Donald Kaufman? I didn’t know he was going to be writing with a partner.’ But, once I started reading the script, it clicked. I was stunned and amazed by how intricately woven it was.”

After Susan Orlean read the script, she was almost speechless. Kaufman had taken her journey and combined it with his own, crossing the border from fact into fiction. “I thought the script was completely strange and yet, wonderful. When I read the sections about the Susan Orlean character, I was absolutely convinced that Charlie Kaufman had indeed come to New York and secretly followed me around, studying me,” she says. “By and large the character is quite different from me. But the initial portrait of me as a writer contained certain details that were startlingly accurate. But the important thing is that, in the end, this was the perfect thing to have happened to this book.” For the casting of Susan Orlean, Jonze imagined Meryl Streep, reasoning that it would take an actress of her talent and caliber to capture the subtleties in the script, which not only looked at the creative process of researching and writing The Orchid Thief, but also at how Orlean’s exploration of John Laroche’s passion for orchids unleashed her own hidden passions. The more Jonze thought about Streep, the more he realized, “it was a pipe dream,” he confesses. But Streep responded enthusiastically to the script. “It was simply one of the best screenplays I’d ever read,” she says. “There was no other script like it. So, I had to say yes.” Having seen Kaufman and Jonze’s previous collaboration, she was prepared for their unorthodox approach to filmmaking. “The sensibility of Being John Malkovich definitely resides in Adaptation,” she adds. “It’s obvious that they both sprang from the same brain.” As for Jonze, she continues, “he was inventive, sure, unfailingly sensitive and very well prepared. I truly enjoyed making this movie ­ except for the parts where I was waist deep in a swamp.”

My first of impression of Meryl was that she had an incredible sense of humor. We were doing our first scene together, which awkwardly was a love scene; before even hello, she dropped a condom on me. We both have a tendency to laugh out loud while shooting. I also thought she was sexy. I think what makes Meryl a great actress is that her instrument is so liquid; everything flows without sharp edges or unintentionally abrupt changes. I remember her going through some transformation to get into a scene, and I saw a very beautiful process of shape-shifting that brought her to the point she intended. I was deeply impressed. (Nicolas Cage, The Hollywood Reporter, June 2004)

In preparing for the role, Streep chose to rely on Kaufman’s character, a composite of the actual New Yorker writer and his own fictional musings. “The first time I met Susan Orlean was at the screening of the finished film,” says Streep. “I asked for her forgiveness and understanding for the liberties we took with her name and reputation. And she said, ‘Oh! That’s okay. I wish I were Susan Orlean!’ I’m a great admirer of her work and I do think parts of it reside in this film, but I’m not sure I can say the same about the character bearing her name.” Adaptation released US theaters in December 2002, and became a suprise hit with critics and moviegoers alike. In 2003, it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper won Golden Globes as Best Supporting Actress and Actor, respectively. And while Meryl received her thirteenth Academy Award nomination for portraying Susan Orlean, Chris Cooper won the Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category for playing John Laroche.

Frederik’s Review

“Adaptation” has been often mentioned as Meryl Streep’s comeback to feature films. While it has been two years between her past project and “Adaptation”, I feel the “comeback” is meant more for the power of her performance. During the late 1990s, Meryl has portrayed an array of women past their prime – like every other actress her age. In “Adaptation”, the character of Susan Orlean in the beginning feels like the way we imagine Meryl Streep. Succesful in her job, happy in her life, polite but private. Then the character peels like an onion, Susan transforms through her meetings with John Laroche and ventures into bizarre territory. Throughout the film, she changes her life, she does drugs, sex and want to have people killed. It’s a role unlike anything moviegoers have seen Meryl do. Therefore, it’s a well-deserved triumph. The film, surprisingly, I didn’t enjoy. It didn’t click with me the first time I saw it – most of the film centers around the two Nicolas Cage characters, the various people in their lives – I found none of it especially interesting. The Orlean/Laroche storyline is the definite interesting part of the film. Since “Adaptation” has been praised so much, I of course re-watched it to see if I’ve been missing the greatness, but for me it simply didn’t work, too wild for my taste. But still worth a recommendation to everyone who wants to see a film away from the usual mainstream.