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MERYL THE PERIL
Magazine / Source: The Scotsman, October 2004 |
Stephen Dalton
MARY Louise Streep never wanted to be an actress. Growing up in Summit, New Jersey, even visiting New York city was a faraway fantasy for the middle-class daughter of a pharmaceutical executive father and commercial artist mother.
"When I was little, I always wanted to be a translator for the United Nations," says Streep, a quietly iconic presence at the Venice Film Festival. "My mother took me to sit in the observation booths, and they were all girls up there with headphones. I lived in New Jersey and we didn’t have any black people or Jews in our little town, it was in the country, it was very rural. Then we came into New York and I saw Africans with headdresses and sheiks with their turbans and these exotic people down in the General Assembly and all the people translating, and it seemed like the most romantic thing I ever saw. So that’s what I wanted to be when I was a little girl."
Instead, Streep grew up to become her very own United Nations, honing her celebrated mastery of accents at Vassar College and Yale University. As a gifted mimic and notorious perfectionist, she would later become the most respected female actor of her generation.
Earning two Academy Awards and 11 further nominations over the past three decades, Streep seems to have been at the top of her game for longer than most actors are in work. From The Deer Hunter to Kramer vs Kramer, Sophie’s Choice to Out of Africa, A Cry in the Dark to The Bridges of Madison County, she has specialised in conflicted, damaged, tormented women - often meticulous creations that seem to live on beyond their films. So much so that, in meeting Streep, an edge of brittle insecurity appears faintly visible beneath her ageless face and coolly cordial manner. Then again, maybe she has just played too many neurotics in her 30-year career.
Either way, at 55, Streep seems to be enjoying an impressive career resurgence in a sustained run of classy, high-profile roles: Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, and now Jonathan Demme’s intelligent blockbuster remake of The Manchurian Candidate are all up there with the best of her 1980s work.
She scoffs at any suggestion of a comeback. "I work a lot, I work too much. I have four films coming." But in truth, motherhood and a desire to keep Hollywood at one remove have prevented her from pursuing plum parts for some years. And with the youngest of her four children - aged 13, 18, 21 and 24 - still at school, family life with her sculptor husband Donald Gummer still takes priority over work.
"We did go to Hollywood for five years because my son didn’t like moving around to all these different schools," Streep says. "My husband was very happy there because the light is so beautiful, but I was miserable because it’s such a one horse town, you can’t escape it. Everywhere you go you see someone you’re
trying to avoid. It’s not like New York, it doesn’t have a life of the streets, it’s a
different place. And I hate the sun, so it wasn’t for me. We lived there for four and a half years. But most of the time, we’ve lived 20 years in Connecticut, 10 years in New York."
At the heart of The Manchurian Candidate is Streep’s powerhouse performance as Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, the sexually domineering mother of Liev Schreiber’s puppet-like presidential contender, who engineers a corporate coup against the White House. It’s a terrific turn; Meryl the Peril in full-blooded monster mode. Although Angela Lansbury, who originated the role in John Frankenheimer’s highly regarded 1962 original, has expressed public disappointment with the younger actress for "messing with something so perfect", Streep’s reimagining of Shaw is more than a match for a Machiavellian character once described in the magazine Film Comment as "a one-woman military-industrial Oedipal complex".
Demme calls Streep’s character "a mother who loves her son too much, who loves her country too much, and is steered in a very personal, almost Shakespearean direction". Shakespearean is right. While the inspiration for Streep’s fearsome political matriarch have been variously cited as Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher, she is much closer to Lady Macbeth.
"I have an appetite for that part, I don’t know why," Streep says. "Margaret Thatcher is much more contained, but I wanted my character to be more unbridled, more direct, less careful. No, I
didn’t use her, and I didn’t use Hillary Clinton either because she’s a different kind of person again.
"The models I used were more male. I looked at a lot of men because of their ability to deal directly and aggressively, and wrestle something to the floor. I love that feeling of being free of all
self-doubt, of all the nagging things of conscience.
"Most of the characters I’ve played are neurotic, or they’re divided within themselves, because that’s the way they write women. But this one is so straight ahead, so certain, unafraid. She’s kind of a fanatic. This is not a role model, this is a terrifying ideologue and a fundamentalist, if you will. A person who is fixed on the goal and often goes with the people who get things done in the world, and it’s horrifying but that’s the truth. People don’t like nuance in a leader, they don’t like any self-doubt whatsoever. They want to know they’re on firm ground with this person."
Streep clearly relished her scene-stealing performance in The Manchurian Candidate, and even gets to savour many of the script’s most deliciously cruel lines: "The assassin always dies, baby, it’s necessary for the national healing." Prentiss Shaw’s wardrobe is almost a character on its own, assembled from Streep’s meticulous research of high-ranking women in politics and television.
"I watched a lot of cable TV coverage of obscure little governmental agency meetings," she says. "You can feel like you’re in the back door, you know? And I watch a lot of the current frenzy of punditry on television, so I’m familiar with all the characters that are prominent in the news.
"We don’t have, unfortunately, too many female senators out of the hundreds in the country - we have maybe six female senators, so there’s not a lot to look at there. But there is a kind of a way that people feel they have to present themselves. They always wear pearls, a big necklace and a pin on a pastel suit. Not a black suit, ever, unless somebody dies. Only then you can put on a black suit, because it’s too scary, the whole idea of women in power. Women leaders are deeply unsettling to people, even the ones who voted for them."
For all her power-dressing malevolence, Prentiss Shaw is not a wholly villainous creation. Streep sees her as more like an overprotective mother whose nurturing instincts have taken on a homicidal, mildly incestuous edge.
"I think we all have murderous instincts," Streep says, "but we cover them with layers of civilisation and inhibition and taboos. We all have these things, otherwise they wouldn’t deeply affect us. When we watch that almost-kiss between mother and son, it sends a shudder through everybody because it’s so deep, the taboo, it’s in our DNA. You know that’s not allowed. But I understand a mother saying, ‘I’ve got to save his life, I’m going to bring him back’. I can understand the desire to rescue a child."
What about the desire to stage a clandestine military coup? Can Streep identify with that urge too? "No, that’s further from my experience. Although sometimes, it’s very appealing."
The mother of all conspiracy thrillers, The Manchurian Candidate is based on a 1959 potboiler novel by Richard Condon, but Demme’s remake still feels topical in light of the war in Iraq, George W Bush’s controversial 2000 election victory, vice-president Dick Cheney’s links to the Halliburton group, and other spooky parallels. Passing references to "regime change" and "civilian contractors" sound uncannily like the news headlines, and you need not dig too deep to find Bush, Cheney or even John Kerry lurking between the lines. But Streep disputes whether opening such a film during a US election battle will strike any extra chords with voters.
"I’m not sure the film gains anything, except that people are attuned to the issues in it," she says. "People are more awake to political stuff, whereas you couldn’t say that about Americans 10 years ago. But now, it’s just more like their receptors are up, people are alert. People are virulently divided right now, so it’s an alive time for films that have some political input. It’s a good thing."
Streep calls herself a "political junkie", devouring newspapers and TV reports on current affairs. She has attended fundraisers and charity auctions for various causes, and even dabbled in hands-on activism by co-founding an advocacy group called Mothers and Others for a Liveable Planet, which specialises in bringing lawsuits against environmental polluters. She remains involved financially, but stepped down from a frontline role when membership swelled to unmanageable levels and began to interfere with her work and family commitments. "I’m still involved in certain issues, specifically
environmental issues," she says.
"I’ve been an advocate for a long time, and I did as much as I could. But inevitably you feel guilty because you’re not doing enough, or nothing seems to change, or it gets worse. So it’s very demoralising work. On the other hand, it’s necessary if you have children - you have to think about the air and the water, and the food they eat. It does seem an uphill battle, at the moment, but I think there’ll be a change."
Maybe Streep should stop acting the political arm-twister and try playing the role for real. But is the United States ready for its first female President? "I don’t think anybody is ready," she says. "Even the countries that have had women presidents are very ambivalent about it, and then they demonise this person after the fact. So no, I don’t think they are. They have to evolve."
For all her ambivalence about Hollywood, Streep’s stock is clearly on a high again after a few years of low-key roles and earnest, issue-based dramas - she even lost the lead role in Evita to Madonna, which tells us something about how acting talent is trampled underfoot by celebrity. But Streep is back at the top of her game, and will soon be seen alongside Jim Carrey in Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, then co-star with Sean Penn and Jude Law in All the King’s Men, with a full slate of future projects to follow.
While there is truth in Streep’s complaint that female film stars encounter a glass ceiling in their 30s and 40s, versatile and iconic stars such as herself, Kim Basinger and Sissy Spacek continue to buck the trend. "It’s changed," Streep says. "A lot of it is to do with the fact that there are more women in positions where they can greenlight movies. Because the truth is, we’re all human, and we all want to see some version of our own story on the screen. The days when men ran most of the studios, they wanted to see women that they liked, and a certain kind of man, so those parts got greenlit. But now, people like Sherry Lansing at Paramount, they’re not afraid to cast older women.
"I mean, Greta Garbo was retired when she was 15 or 20 years younger than I am. Bette Davis did a film with Joan Crawford, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, she was an old crone in that movie and she was four years younger than me. When she did All About Eve, she was Cate Blanchett’s age and she was on the skids. So the whole thing has shifted, and that’s because we’re evolving. It’s getting a little bit better, but it’s so slow."
Streep is clearly in a position to pick and choose roles, and pointedly avoids the kind of big-budget blockbuster that would keep her price and profile high. "I’m not going to do the robot movie," she says. "Usually it’s an emotional hook that brings me in, initially. I know this because my heart starts to race when I’m reading a script. That’s when I know it’s something I want to do."
And yet, even with the resurgence in her reputation as one of the most acclaimed and awarded screen stars of her generation, Streep still feels compromised by the options on offer to women actors. "We’re all compromised," she says, "but we do our little bit to undermine that compromise, so it’s a constant war between your scruples and your ideals and your willingness to compromise and all those things. But that’s the human condition."
The Manchurian Candidate is on general release from November 5
