What is it with Meryl Streep?[rssbreak]
Why is it that she’s suddenly hotter than Angelina Jolie, for god’s sake? Why are streams of fans – most of them female, all of them already with tickets – lined up around the block two hours before the start time of Streep’s onstage interview at the ROM last week?
Most 60-year-old women are made to believe their time is up, but Streep’s time – in defiance of Hollywood’s typical slapdown of women over 40 – is right now. And women just can’t get enough of her.
We weren’t always Streep fans. Sure, we appreciated her talent, but when it came to personality, she didn’t really have much. She was so serious, burying herself in all those characters and accents. She didn’t radiate heat like other screen stars. She seems to be the only American female movie star who in her early years didn’t lead with her sexuality, and that’s a small miracle in the film industry. For that she got our respect, but not our undying love.
Now we buy tickets on Craigslist for $350 just to be in her orbit.
And why not? Streep, who once came across as super-earnest, has opened right up. She used to be guarded about the mysteries of her craft, uneasy about giving away any secrets, and has been almost invisible in the DVD extras for her movies. In the must-see HBO documentary Theater Of War, about the 2006 stage production of Mother Courage she starred in, she complains about being filmed in rehearsal.
“It’s like asking to see an architect’s building and being shown the plumbing,” she grumbles.
Yet at the ROM event, she’s positively blabby about the mythologizing of her preparation for a role. Too much prep can get in the way, she says. Going completely blank is a much better acting strategy.
And she’s laugh-out-loud funny. She imitates Bart Simpson, rolls her eyes – “Ridiculous,” she says – remembering that she played Philip Seymour Hoffman’s mother onstage in The Seagull and, in answer to a question about her tendency to rearrange her cleavage while up there accepting awards, deadpans, “Somebody’s got to do it.”
Lately, Streep’s been throwing her body around, too, giving one big fuck-you to New Yorker critic Pauline Kael’s famous dis (“I can’t see her from the neck down”) of Streep’s art. At an age when women are dismissed as having dried right up, Streep is more physical than ever. Just watch her haul that wagon in Mother Courage. It’s hard to stay as permanently clenched as she does as the angry nun in Doubt. In Mamma Mia!, she’s jumping on the bed and doing cannonballs into the sea.
And she’s sexier than ever, whether as the diabolical Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada or sleeping around in the upcoming It’s Complicated. The movie poster has her in full clinch with co-star Alec Baldwin, and that’s gotta be a first for an American female star entering her seventh decade.
On the ROM stage, Streep attributes her recent success to the increasing number of women in decision-making positions in the movie industry
. And since Prada in 2006, Streep’s said the equivalent of “Eat this” to anyone who won’t pay attention to the female demographic between 40 and 65.
Mamma Mia!, with a paltry budget of $52 ?million, made upwards of $609 million worldwide. Julie & Julia, made for just $40 ?million last summer, took in $100 million.
I guess I’m feeling the way older guys do when they watch Mick Jagger perform.
It’s still all about sex, money and power. But some of us are grooving on the fact that an aging female movie actor has her hands on all three.
Streep’s on-stage interview with Johanna Schneller was part of the ROM Institute of Contemporary Culture’s events exploring the meaning of celebrity. As part of the Celibrity series, ROM presents Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008, on view until January 3.
susanc@nowtoronto.com
