Occupied Territories

It may be hard to recall, now that Streep has become our thespian in chief, that her acting hasn’t always been universally acclaimed. One famous detractor, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, found Streep’s studied perfection bloodless. “[A]fter I’ve seen her in a movie,” Kael observed in her “Sophie’s Choice” review, “I can’t visualize her from the neck down.”

By the time “Out of Africa” came around, Kael had had enough of the foreign accents. But her biggest gripe with Streep in this sweeping epic — and the cornerstone of her critique of Streep’s acting — is that “her character doesn’t deepen” or “come to mean more to us.”

Streep told the Guardian in 2008 how she felt about this rejection: “I’m incapable of not thinking about what Pauline wrote. And you know what I think? That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blond hair, and the heartlessness of them got her.”

Streep’s cool, self-protective analysis — wrongheaded, in Kael biographer Brian Kellow’s view — is somehow telling. It reveals emotion yet deflects it fairly quickly with provocative speculation. It’s the same cerebral pattern of her performances, which have a striking way of depicting pain without risking much personal exposure.

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Charles McNulty, “My Meryl Streep problem”

Meryl Streep pretty much defines everything I find uninteresting about how the mainstream thinks about acting today, and this quote, I think, captures why. The whole idea of “revealing” and then “deflecting” emotion seems like everything you don’t want from an actor. Wouldn’t we, in fact, want our ideal performers to do the complete opposite? The performances I’m most attracted to are the ones where an actor/actress shows us something almost unintentionally, as if it’s just leaking out of him/her. Streep may be talented, but is it perhaps possible that her “flawless” technique is the very thing that gets in the way of this revealing that we, or at least I, desire so much to see from actors/actresses? There are very good reasons that some of the most interesting performances in the history of cinema have come from nonprofessionals, and someone like Nadine Nortier (who played Mouchette in Bresson’s film of the same name) is better in the one role she played than Streep is in all of her roles combined.