 "one of the best" | 2010-02-26 |
| - Reviewed By watch hunting from Corvallis, OR |
| I think this is one of Meryl's best films. It evr gts old for me. |
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 "Pointless" | 2009-07-04 |
| - Reviewed By Kona from Emerald City |
Meryl Streep stars as a young British woman working for the French resistance during WWII. After the war, she goes home.
I didn't get this movie at all. I thought it was poorly conceived and written and basically a bore. Streep was the only good actor in the cast and even she overacted a lot in a very unsympathetic role. Though the movie spans twenty years, she didn't age at all, looking young and beautiful throughout. The director chose not to have fade-outs or subtitles telling us what year it was, so we had to guess by looking at the clothing styles. Very confusing and tiresome.
We do get to see a dark-haired Ian McKellen as a stuffy diplomat and a young Sting as a clueless stud. But nothing much happens in this film; it's just endless talking (it's based on a play) and nothing interesting or touching is said. Odd and off-putting, this is one to skip. |
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 "Plenty but not wholly good" | 2009-02-13 |
| - Reviewed By G.C.J. from UK |
I saw this film again the other day, and was reminded of what I thought when it first came out: it's difficult.
First, the good: the acting is excellent, and so is the dialogue, making it one of those British films (Australian director and US lead apart) that are a pleasure to watch. The opening sequence is masterful in conveying the deadly danger of the whole SOE enterprise, of the brutal and near surreal situation of stormtroopers in a picturesque French town, of the fear, isolation and bravery of the SOE operatives. The moment where Lazar bicycles away from Suzanne giving a mock-theatrical wave is especially moving, capturing the heroism while juxtaposing it with the wobbly bicyle to underline that these are understated heroics performed on a secret stage, which no one but the protagonists may ever know about.
The difficult part lies in the themes of the work. The title Plenty, and the bookmarking of the first and last scenes in France - the first showing heroism, the latter a flashback of Suzanne at the end of the war rapturously foreseeing "Days and days like this" to come - clearly imply a drama about whether the idealism and bravery of those who fought did indeed translate into a land of plenty for the victors.
But as the central protagonist and vehicle for all this, Suzanne is quite simply the wrong character. After a shaky post-war start, she quickly progresses to a fairly comfortable status, in a land which does seem to have a fair bit, if not quite plenty. With talent, a rich and kind boyfriend, a good job in advertising, a lively and liberated best girlfriend, and so on, she can enjoy the jazz clubs, the slightly tatty bonhomie of the coronation, and much besides, if she wanted. Even her girlfriend, who doesn't hesitate to diss her boss and get fired, seems to be doing just fine, able to dabble bohemianly in painting and writing and still afford a holiday in Morocco. Could be worse, basically.
Whereas, in fact, Suzanne drifts into excessive and indulgent nostalgia, selfishness, and a madness which seems less caused by whatever miseries and hypocrises exist in post-war Britain than by personal mental illness.
As regards the nostalgia, we would be all to willing to accept that the heroism of the war-period means that such a person is just too big for ordinary life afterwards. But Hare himself makes it not so simple. Obviously Suzanne is brave, otherwise she wouldn't be in the SOE. But in the opening sequence in France, it is Suzanne who is pictured as scared to the point of nearly getting herself and Lazar captured, and then shown moaning that she's only a courier and shouldn't have to do this sort of thing. And later on in the film when interviewed by the BBC and asked if she thinks about the past often, she coolly and dishonestly denies it.
The selfishness is substantial. Although she has moments of generosity, she is more frequently cruel, indifferent to her husband and a man she chooses as her sperm donor, and indeed to pretty much anyone else who crosses her path. There seems to be no sense to this other than that she thinks she is fundamentally superior to others, and their subsequent grief is just their bad luck - ironically, precisely the arrogant attitude of those she fought against in the war. And because of what we have seen in regard to her weakness for nostalgia, not at all justifiable.
And the madness, as mentioned, seems to come from within rather than from any real problem with post-war Britain. The one seriously shameful event of that period, Suez, was something widely recognised at the time as having been an appalling blunder. This is acknowledged by Hare in his treatment of the Gielgud-played diplomat who resigns in disgust. In the powerful scene that deals with Suzanne's reaction, we have the impression that she almost as delighted as disgusted, at this further opportunity to despise the world around her.
So on this basis, it is very hard to see whether Hare was getting at some great global meaningfulness (conceivably, that Suzanne herself represents post-war Britain) (but then that would imply that Brock the husband is the US, and as far as I know the UK never brought the US to its knees) which in the end doesn't quite jump out of the script, or whether he was just a little confused as to whether he was writing a psychological character examination or a heavy-duty allegorical portrait of post-war Britain.
Be all that as it may, I would still recommend this film. It is moving and well made, and even if the excellent set-pieces somehow don't add up to the integrated whole one would like, individually those pieces are of an exceptionally high quality.
Oddly enough, the film's one glaring failure (to anyone familiar with the UK, at any rate), Meryl Streep's efforts to produce an upper-class English accent, mirrors the film as a whole: you know from the start that she's got it wrong, but when you listen to the words one by one you are hard-pushed to pin down the problem. Basically, on a syllable by syllable basis, it seems right. But take a step back and you know it isn't, quite.
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 "Less than meets the eye" | 2008-07-31 |
| - Reviewed By Trevor Willsmer from London, England |
It seems a cheap shot to say that there's not much to Plenty, but Meryl Streep's rather wearingly one-note performance does tend to show up the thinness of the material. Despite his penchant for bombastic metaphor and excruciatingly on-the-nose dialogue, David Hare's adaptation of his play feels rather closer to naturalism than usual, but when the woman whose dilemma at the heart of his big theme is so resoundingly one-note you do feel as if you're just being told the same thing over and over again. Streep is the former SOE worker who, like Britain itself, was at her best and most noble during the war but struggles to come to terms with the post-war reality of stagnation, emptiness and missed opportunities in a country whose soul-crushing bureaucracy grows as its empire shrinks. Which is a perfectly serviceable metaphor for post-war disillusionment even if the WW2 scenes in France have absolutely no vitality or danger too them to provide much of a contrast. Unfortunately it's another case of the actress giving an accent rather than a performance, and a not entirely convincing one at that. She just says the words, overpronouncing one or two from time to time and plays the superficial surface attention-seeking big moments rather than showing us what's inside, which gets to be like watching Lady MacBeth's mad scene for two hours. Rather than a woman being stifled in a world where expression is frowned upon, there's not much sign that there was ever a person in there to begin with. The only scene where she convinces is the final flashback, and at the cost of losing dramatic irony it may have been better had the scene been moved earlier in the picture to give a sense of the hope and ideals that are dashed.
Not that Streep is the only offender. Almost everyone is very visibly giving a performance, as if reminding us that this used to be a play. Tracey Ullman delivers a particularly awful supporting turn, sounding like she's doing a bad voice over for a preschool cartoon character as her affectedly bohemian best friend. Ian McKellan does little more than a second-rate Alan Bates impersonation despite being gifted one of the film's better scenes explaining the diplomatic mindset that has drowned the brief spurt of post-war optimism. Only John Gielgud's betrayed civil servant, stretching himself just a little bit more than his latter roles usually required, and an excellent Charles Dance as Streep's devoted but constantly frustrated minor diplomat husband who never realizes he's the personification of many of her problems really shine. The film improves as it progresses despite Fred Schepisi's often coldly detached direction, and there are good moments - a dinner party from hell at the height of the Suez Crisis chief among them - but they just aren't quite enough to make up for the void at its heart. In a way, this feels like a film that may have been made too soon. Cate Blanchett played the role in a West End revival a few years ago and brought out the nuance and struggle within the character far more convincingly. Still, at least the film does offer Gielgud telling a Burmese diplomat's wife that "Ingmar Bergman is NOT a bloody Norwegian, he is a bloody Swede."
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| "Sometimes a Cigar is just a Cigar" | 2008-07-05 |
| - Reviewed By Robert from Niagara Falls, Ontario Canada |
A commentator here claims to have seen this film 50X and is prepared to see it 50X more.
Few films if any (unless I am studying to become an actor) would draw that much interest.
Streep does a good job playing a troubled woman who lives in the past but who is embroiled in the present that has little future for her. She does not know what she really wants and expects so much. She sure can manipulate.
There are people who say that they were born in the wrong century or period. Many of us long to be someplace else that appears to have been better....more exciting. Westerns sometime do that to me. In reality a 2 hr western could be 20 years or more of ones life....perhaps not that exciting after all.
I recently watched Streep in Holocaust. 1978 film. |
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| "Hare Delivers The Goods" | 2007-07-07 |
| - Reviewed By Almawood from Kansas, USA |
| Socialists have a serious problem of convincing themselves and others that life would be improved by an expansive government. They have trouble convincing anyone that our lives would be improved by having our property confiscated and distributed to our less fortunate brethren. Yes, it is a hard sell this socialism, which is why most socialists don't talk about the future. Socialism belongs to the past. There is, of course, no socialist utopia that can be pointed out, so here Hare, an old agitprop playwright, has found the French resistance as a metaphor for the utopia he yearns for. In America, leftists identify the 60s as a time for triumphant social involvement. The problem with this kind of nostalgia is that intellectually one fails to face certain brutal truths. The resistance, which no doubt had its moments of personal heroism, was paid for by capitalist America and by the earnings of England's soon to be bankrupted Empire. The 60s were funded by the American business class that bankrolled its children's escapades. Hare's utopia, in short, was a panty- raid, a kind of Spanish Civil War all over again, paid for by the great nascent empire emerging across the Atlantic. Good times were had by all, yes, that is one way of thinking of WWII. Sex, daring, sadness: almost as good as a trip on the Titanic without the iceberg. This play is a thrill, but I don't believe that post-war life was empty and pointless. Susan, Hare's heroine, was a spoiled, cruelly selfish woman who, not unlike pre-war aristocratic adventuresses, simply couldn't find a way to occupy her time once she'd landed a rich husband. |
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