STREEPS OF FIRE: THE STREEP LIEUTENANT'S AFRICA

The Good, The Pod and The Ugly

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THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN and OUT OF AFRICA
This week: Two films released four years apart do as much to delineate Streep's meteoric rise to being one of the all-time great film actors as anything.
FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN (1981) is an adaptation of John Fowles' post-modern 1969 novel, which addresses directly the construction and themes of the "Victorian Novel". In Karel Resz' film of legendary playwright Harold Pinter's screenplay, instead of historical fact checking within the narrative and three different endings, they opt for a meta-narrative of a film shoot romance mirroring the plot of a film-with-the-film called The French Lieutenant's Woman. It's an odd choice we chew on quite a bit. But how is Streep? To be fair, there is a lot going on here and she is playing a character playing a character in a near-parody of old school melodramas and her choices in that are choices made by the modern actress she is also playing. Head spinning. Her performance earned her an Oscar nomination but this is not the Streep we see four short years later.
OUT OF AFRICA (1985), directed by Sydney Pollack from a script by Karl Luedtke adapted from the memoir by Isak Dinesen and two Dinesen biographies. It's the story of a wealthy Danish woman going to Africa to live on a coffee farm with her cheating husband. While there she meets individualist ivory hunter (Robert Redford, playing an Englishman with an American accent who embodies the white man's burden of protecting land they conquered from people just like them, much like Kevin Costner in Yellowstone) and falls in love. It's a classic sweeping epic (unfortunately not shot anamorphic as Pollack usually did) that charts ugly bouts of colonization. Streep and Redford do speak to that within the film, but it is generally while doing the things they fear more people will come and do (hunting, treating the natives like second class citizens, getting in fights with other white imperialists, driving big cars over the Savanna, etc). It's tough to take at points but the sweep, the romance, the music and the performances can make you squint enough to get a ton of value out of it as an old school Hollywood melodrama. In particular, Streep's performance. As in Sophie's Choice, she is clearly completely in control of her character and with full knowledge of how the camera captures her performance. She is nearly flawless. Pairing this with French Lieutenant's Woman was a brilliant idea to illustrate where and how someone makes the jump from good to great to GOAT. She did not win Best Actress this year because Hollywood was already tiring of her brilliant performances year after year, however. That perception would lead to Streep's turn to comedy later in the decade with the execrable She-Devil.
Ken. Thomas and Andi will tell you all about both films. It's a must-listen for any fan of Streep.
THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.
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Ken: Ken Koral
Jack: jackk1096