The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (402 page)

Since then, he has become the single-minded follower of his own path, and, in the event, an inspiration to the new German cinema. His formal preoccupations make any short account of his films comic and useless. There is a good, enthusiastic book by Richard Roud. But Straub’s films need to be seen and heard, time and again, for their full complexity and their possible limits to become clear.

His first two films are derived from works by the German novelist Heinrich Böll. The Bach film was ten years in preparation and achievement, a meticulous study in period authenticity and actual sound, an intriguing celebration of Bach open to the diversity of random suggestion that occurs while watching the film. Like few films, it brings the viewer back to him-or herself.
The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp
emerged from an invitation to Straub to direct a play that he proceeded to cut from two hours to under ten minutes. Since then, he has filmed plays by Corneille and Brecht, in costume, but in unashamedly modern settings. He then made a long-nurtured record of Schoenberg’s opera,
Moses and Aaron
, which emphasizes the struggle between word and image.

His austerity may leave gaps in his output, and the films themselves will usually be hard to find. But no one seriously interested in film should neglect them or the theoretical issues that attend them.

Huillet died in 2006. The couple had lived together, without children, and they seemed to have shared all the work.

Meryl Streep
(Mary Louise Streep), b. Summit, New Jersey, 1949
Meryl Streep is a model actress in American pictures—but some have said in a way that makes acting seem overly solemn or calculated? At forty, she was not simply regarded as the most talented woman in pictures, but the most distinguished. Distinction is not common praise in movies, nor is it often well intended. The distinguished are sometimes those the public does not love: the term lay heavily on the heads of Olivier, Katharine Hepburn, and even Al Pacino, at times. But at the very end of the eighties, Streep had been brilliant, properly enclosed, and unquestionably Australian in
A Cry in the Dark
(88, Fred Schepisi). Very few people went to see that picture—its subject and setting were not appealing—but some reckoned that Streep’s presence was by then sufficient warning to wary audiences. She would be superb, rather cold, in a movie that had little vulgar magic. Even critics who admired her had grown weary of the complaint that in her highest flights of skill one felt the strenuous breathing of a mistress technician. She had been nominated six times for best actress in ten years, and twice as supporting actress. She had a win in both categories. But did anyone care?

Something like panic seemed to set in. She
was
forty; she had never been universally acclaimed as a beauty; and she was generally associated with serious, if not tragic, material. So she made a plunge into comedy little short of disastrous: as the romantic novelist in
She-Devil
(89, Susan Seidelman); as Carrie Fisher’s alter ego in
Postcards from the Edge
(90, Mike Nichols);
Defending Your Life
(91, Albert Brooks); and with Goldie Hawn in the horribly miscalculated
Death Becomes Her
(92, Robert Zemeckis).

In trying to be funny, Streep became harder to like. A haughty edge showed, no matter that she was bravely urging herself into strange territory. She was nominated again for
Postcards from the Edge
, and she was as clever as ever in the picture, not to say funny with many of its throwaway lines. But the movie (let alone its audience) hardly knew how to handle Streep in the role of a failure, a woman dominated by her mother, not that good at her work, and humiliated by her own weaknesses.
Postcards
cried out for a lead actress of less stature—it was so obvious that it deserved Carrie Fisher (just as she deserved it). Streep is not easily small, abject, or a discard—she should have played the mother. Indeed, given the assignment, she may magnify failure until it becomes magnificent and operatic—for example,
Ironweed
(87, Hector Babenco). She has such problems now with seeming natural.

Streep’s parents were well-to-do (the father an executive in pharmaceuticals, the mother a commercial artist). She was raised in Bernardsville, New Jersey, and she went on to Vassar and to the Yale Drama School—she graduated from there in 1975. By then, she was famous already as an arresting stage actress of uncommon range and intensity. She appeared at the Public Theater in a musical,
Alice in Concert
—she was trained as a singer as well as an actress. Among her other stage roles, she was in a Shakespeare in the Park
Measure for Measure
(as Isabella), where she met and fell in love with the actor John Cazale. She nursed him in his final illness, up to his death in March 1978. Later, she married a sculptor, Don Gummer, and they have had children together.

She made her screen debut, on television, in
The Deadliest Season
(77, Robert Markowitz), and in a black wig as a bitchy friend in
Julia
(77, Fred Zinnemann)—Jane Fonda is said to have predicted a great career. But Streep made a bigger impact, and won an Emmy, in the TV miniseries
Holocaust
(78, Marvin J. Chomsky).

The Deer Hunter
(78, Michael Cimino) was her first big movie, though her part was very little developed in the script. But Streep brought a remarkable presence to her scenes and a quality of uncertainty that enriched the entire film. She was vivid and hostile in
Manhattan
(79, Woody Allen), and doing her best against two child-guys in
Kramer vs. Kramer
(79, Robert Benton).

In two films, she worked very hard to be gorgeous and sexy, yet something failed to click—was it inner restraint, or some fierce certainty that actresses should not sell themselves:
The Seduction of Joe Tynan
(79, Jerry Schatzberg) and
Still of the Night
(82, Benton)?

It hardly seemed to matter, for now she was a reigning figure, capable of any accent or period—a labeled great actress:
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(81, Karel Reisz); luminous, touching, yet oddly remote in
Sophie’s Choice
(82, Alan J. Pakula)—as if her very genius led us to see how fake that story is. She was at her best, wilder, more dangerous, and less respectable in
Silkwood
(83, Nichols).
Falling in Love
(84, Ulu Grosbard) was a novelette love story, with De Niro.

She was astounding again in
Plenty
(85, Schepisi), though it was ominously clear by then that her taste was for women no one else could endure.
Out of Africa
(85, Sydney Pollack) was a sensation for a moment, but I can hardly recall her in the film.
Heartburn
(86, Nichols) was a folly of a special kind of celebrity.
Ironweed
might have worked on stage—on film it felt dead and studied. And
A Cry in the Dark
is a film that any young actress should examine.

Is this Streep’s fate—is she just an academic model or can she find older women who seem alive for the large audience? I think her depth is too great to accept failure now. But she has shown no instinct for organizing her own career, and she cannot expect to have new Sophies presented to her on Dresden china. She is going to have to take her future into her own hands. She might do worse than return to the stage for a few years. Better that than travesties like
House of the Spirits
(93, Bille August) or the determined athleticism of
The River Wild
(94, Curtis Hanson).

She made a fabulous character out of
The Bridges of Madison County
(95, Clint Eastwood)—and got another nomination. She did
Before and After
(96, Barbet Schroeder);
Marvin’s Room
(96, Jerry Zaks); the mother of an epileptic on TV in
… First Do No Harm
(97, Jim Abrahams);
Dancing at Lughnasa
(98, Pat O’Connor); then back to her very best as the dying mother—not so smart, but full of understanding—in
One True Thing
(98, Carl Franklin);
Music of the Heart
(99, Wes Craven).

She was the voice of the Blue Fairy in
A.I
. (01, Steven Spielberg); she was Susan Orlean in
Adaptation
(02, Spike Jonze);
The Hours
(02, Stephen Daldry); many people, dead and alive, in
Angels in America
(03, Nichols);
Flora Plum
(04, Jodie Foster); and doing Angela Lansbury in
The Manchurian Candidate
(04, Jonathan Demme).

Updating Meryl Streep is always eventful. Since the last edition, she has passed the age of sixty (without letting it look old) and made twelve new pictures. She had pushed the total of her Oscar nominations to fifteen (it became sixteen, when
Julie & Julia
was considered). She won the AFI Live Achievement Award in 2004 and the Stanislavsky prize from Moscow. She has added a few poor-to-bad films to her list:
Prime
(05, Ben Younger);
Rendition
(07, Gavin Hood);
Lions for Lambs
(07, Robert Redford);
Mamma Mia!
(08, Phyllida Loyd); unusually limited as the Mother Superior in
Doubt
(08, John Patrick Shanley).

At the same time, she has done
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
(04, Brad Silberling);
A Prairie Home Companion
(05, Robert Altman);
Dark Matter
(07, Chen Shizheng);
Julie &Julia
(09, Ephron);
Fantastic Mr. Fox
(09, Wes Anderson);
It’s Complicated
(09, Nancy Meyers).

There was also a week or so in the years under consideration when I went back to look at
The Deer Hunter
and was immediately carried away by the amount of meaning and feeling she was contributing without lines or apparent direction from the rest of the film. It seems possible that she is troubled by her stature now—not that she knows what else to do—and she is, in a plain, decent way, someone much troubled by the world. Well, she has done her best with that dilemma, and she represents the best we will ever have.

Barbra Streisand
, b. Brooklyn, New York, 1942
Only in her early sixties, Streisand seems like an institution now, a creation of the ages, as volatile and brooding as the San Andreas fault, even if we cannot always take her as seriously as she would wish. She has the grand manner in the way some people are ill—in other words, it is her constant handicap, the joke about her, an instant means of identification. If her eye falls upon something—a cause, a president, a tennis player, or a line of art deco—the world thrills and giggles. There is no ordinary reality left for Barbra Streisand. If she ever wanted it.

She is, or was, a great singer. She was never a beautiful woman, and so the drama of her singing sometimes seemed a battle with her looks. After all, opera singers are not required to be gorgeous—but those who sing love ballads have to face the test of sexiness. Streisand won that fight through huge will and self-belief. Maybe they turned to armor.

The victory had come on records, on TV, and on stage in
I Can Get It For You Wholesale
and
Funny Girl
. When the film of the latter (68, William Wyler) flourished, and won her the Oscar, she became an untouchable in show business. She could do anything. Her own horizons expanded.

In fact, she was far from infallible. Her next three films had very mixed fortunes:
Hello, Dolly!
(69, Gene Kelly);
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
(70, Vincente Minnelli); and
The Owl and the Pussycat
(71, Herbert Ross), the first sign that perhaps she was interested in being an actress. But singers stand up alone, with just a mike to control the crowd: it is as hard for them to relax as it was for silent actresses to be quiet.

A startling advance was clear in
What’s Up, Doc?
(72, Peter Bogdanovich). She lacked the finesse of Hepburn, one could not be sure that she knew what a screwball comedy was, but she was growing more beautiful—in floppy cap and red shirt she dominated attention; she ably carried off Bogdanovich’s addition to screwball scheme by knowing as much as the professor about rocks; she is glorious discovered on a piano in a mauve sweater, prepared to break into “As Time Goes By,” and she asks “What’s up, Doc?” as if she really loves the man. As Larrabee says in
Doc
, she’s a gem.

If only she could have done more screwball, instead of such ordinary material as
Up the Sandbox
(72, Irvin Kershner), the radical chick to sleepy Redford in
The Way We Were
(73, Sydney Pollack), or
For Pete’s Sake
(74, Peter Yates). What a swan song she could have made for Cukor, or he might have made out of
Funny Lady
(75, Ross), a sequel to Streisand’s first success with Fanny Brice.

She was one of the few uninhibited stars, yet she would hardly risk her status in ordinary projects. A touch of madness was necessary. It came to her with Jon Peters, a hairdresser-impresario who got her into
A Star Is Born
(76, Frank Pierson). It is as if Bernhardt had met Judy Garland. The movie was a kind of home movie in which mother knew best. Barbra was executive producer and Jon was producer. Jon directed for a time, keeping the seat warm between Jerry Schatzberg and Pierson. Barbra wrote some of her songs, wore her own clothes, and doubtless rewrote the script. The film is lunatic, but eventually hard to resist—as proved by its huge success. Barbra said she was playing a rock singer, but anyone with any sense knew she was just having a whale of a time.

She acted with Ryan O’Neal in
The Main Event
(79, Howard Zieff) and with Gene Hackman in
All Night Long
(81, Jean-Claude Tramont). Was she running out of steam, or desire? Far from it: in 1983 she directed and played the lead in
Yentl
, a musical adaptation of a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. She made herself unpopular; she may be egotist and tyrant beyond compare. Never mind—
Yentl
is one of the great American debuts, an authentic musical film such as no one dreams of now, with gorgeous songs that exactly dramatize a rich, clever story.