David Denby

“…. Meryl Streep, long red hair tucked under a hooded cape, walks morosely toward us and out onto the great stone breakwater of Lyme Regis…. As Sarah Woodruff, the genteel governess jilted by the mysterious Frenchman, Meryl Streep presents a countenance that is practically a movie in itself—pale and passionate, with wildly darting greenish eyes, a small, frightened mouth, and suggestions of sensual abandon in the way she nuzzles the inside of the hood….

“Against the world of respectable society, the filmmakers counterpose the Undercliff—a dark, dense wood at the edge of the sea, a tangled erotic meeting place where Sarah entices Charles by “confessing” her shameful affair of eighteen months earlier. This is Meryl Streep’s big moment, and I think she goes as far with it as Fowles and filmmakers’ conception of Sarah will allow—which isn’t far enough, alas, to be truly exciting. Her Sarah is a woman absorbed in sorrow and shame—morbid and perhaps a little mad. As she relates the tale of her fall into “sin,” she pauses frequently, as if calculating the effect of the next moment on Charles. Streep appears to be thinking before our eyes, and when she describes the seduction itself, we’re startled to see that she slowly lets down her hair. Is Sarah acting out the seduction in order to excite Charles? Dreaming it? Longing for it? By keeping her voice calm, quiet, governessy, Streep makes Sarah thoroughly ambiguous and enigmatic. One longs for an unregenerate wildness to break out of her and smash the movie’s “literate” surface, but that is not to be. This fine performance is so studied, so carefully nuanced, that it never takes full flight.”

David Denby
New York, September 28, 1981

Stanley Kauffmann

“But the doing of it all is beautiful…. Reisz has cast his picture perfectly, and has go t performances that reflect his cast’s belief in him…. With a little wisdom and a lot of luck, Irons can have a large career.

“Streep is having one. After she finished shooting this lavish film last year, she did Alice in Elizabeth Swados’s quirky mucial based on Lewis Carroll at the Public Theater in New York. Clad in T-shirt and overalls, Streep sang and tumbled about, with no tinge of slumming but—I imagined—enjoying the difference from what she knew and what we didn’t yet know about this film.

“I cite two moments from her performance here. When the 1867 woman decides to give herself to Irons, he carries her into the bedroom, and she lies on the bed waiting for him to get out of his complicated Victorian clothes as quickly as he can. Reisz wisely keeps the camera on her the whole time. Her face is like an elixir of fate and fascination. And there is a scene—the best use in the film of its double structure—in which Streep and Irons, as the two modern actors, rehearse a scene in caseual modern dress, in a modern room. She is moving toward him, she telss us from her script, when her dress catches in a bramble, she stumbles, and he helps her. First, they merely “walk it,” speaking the words and timing the movements. Then, they start over, and Streep still in mod clothes, does it: with sheer, sharp imagination, steps into Tennyson and Millais; and the character, not the actress, walks toward us and stumbles. Reisz cuts instantly to the same scene in the period strand as Irons, now in costume, steps forward in the woods to help her. It’s good directing and editing; but the effect is as if Streep’s power had force the scene out of the informal modern into its true period and place.

“My only stricture about Streep is that, while she easily sustains the vocal flourish of the period role, she sometimes lets her voice go dry in the modern role, something I thought she had overcome. It’s as if she needs strong vocal demands in order to come up with sufficient voice.”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, September 23, 1981
Field of View, pp. 123-

Andrew Sarris

“As for Sarah and Charles, the casting of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons is, at most, a mixed blessing. Let us say simply at the outset that I was not overwhelmed by the spectacle of Meryl Streep on the Lyme Regis jetty. Vanessa Redgrave, an earlier casting suggestion, would have been infinitely more haunting and more memorable. Even Vanessa’s political idiocies off-screen would have contributed to the iconography of her 19th century madness. It is not that Meryl Streep is not beautiful in certain contexts. It is simply that certain registers of flamboyance and abandon that may be within her acting range are not necessarily within her visual range. All I could think of was how hard Meryl Streep labored to produce an expression into which Isabelle Huppert seemed to drift with a more fittingly oxlike passivity.

“Yet it would be a mistake to say that Miss Streep is a washout as Sarah. Her best moments arise not from the intuitions in her gaze but from the profound self-awareness in her voice. If this were 1930, we could say confidently that Meryl Streep was going to become one of the great actresses of talking pictures. She can tell a story verbally with the feeling and grace and style one associates with the most gifted practitioners in prose.

“Nonetheless, her enormous talent creates an imbalance in the adaptation. Sarah, who was supposed to be so mysterious in the novel, emerges on the screen with more lucidity than does Charles, about whom so much is written….

“Professed admirers of the novel will probably seize upon any pretext to complain about the departures themovie has made from its sacred text. It is more likely, however, that they will be entranced sufficiently by Meryl Streep’s conspicuous abilities as an actress to give Reisz and Pinter the benefit of every doubt, and if their minds should wander during the flip-flops from past to present and back, they might wonder how Streep will attack Sophie’s Choice. And after Sophie’s Choice, can Gorky Park be far behind? The quality best-seller of the ‘80s may eventually evolve into a series of vehicles for the presumably infinitely versatile Meryl Streep. In this hyped-up star-is-born context, it seems piddling for me to suggest that Reisz and Pinter and Fowles might have considered making Leo McKern’s Doctor Grogan more of an authoritative point-of-view character….”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, September 9-15, 1981 [lo some on character]

"Streep is clearly the Olivia de Havilland of the ‘80s. Middlebrows can see all the gears working in her acting technique, so she will probably get more Oscars than she deserves before people tire of the endless ways she can shake out her hair while reading a line. As it happens, she is the best line reader in the business, but that is not saying much in this mumbly age….”

Sarris, March 8, 1982

Pauline Kael

“For the movie version of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman to set our imaginations buzzing, the one essential is that the distraught heroine, Sarah Woodruff, who keeps a vigil on the stone jetty of an English seacoast village in 1867 and, motionless, looks out to the gray sea, must be alluringly mysterious. If she isn’t, ther’s no story, because the novel—a pastiche—is (among other things) a meditation on the romantic mystery women and sensual madowmen of Victorian fiction. It’s Fowles’rather charming conceit that if this mysterious cloaked siren, with her haunted face and wild, free-floating hair, happened to stray into the ambience of the Pre-Raphaelites she would seem to belong there—she would be a free and independent New Woman. We never really get into the movie, because, as Sarah, Meryl Streep gives an immaculate, technically accomplished performance, but she isn’t mysterious. She’s pallid and rather glacial. When she ensnares te aristocratic Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons) and tells him her two different versions of her relations with the French lieutenant and how she became an outcast, there’s no passion, and not even any special stress, in her accounts, and so they have no weight in the movie. Meryl Streep’s technique doesn’t add up to anything. We’re not fascinated by Sarah; she’s so distanced from us that all we can do is observe how meticulous Streep—and everything else about the movie—is….

“…. Meryl Streep has a few moments that register: ther’s one in which Sarah Woodruff dramatizes herself, sketching her own vision of her grief, and there’s another, toward the end, when, in the middle of a scene that is being played for the cameras, Sarah suddenly loses her accent and metamorphoses into the American actress playing her….

“Much of The French Lieutenant’s Woman might be taking place in a glass case, and Streep seems to be examining her performance while she gives it. If Reisz and Pinter and Streep are doing this deliberately, it’s an almost unforgivable mistake in judgment—what could be the point of showing us actors who don’t fully get into their roles? Moviegoers have no urgent need to see more uncommitted acting. When the learned Sarah says, “I am a remarkable person,” you may want to make some small, coarse sound of derision. In the modern scenes, as the American actress, Streep has a promising spark—she often seems abou
to giggle. But all she’s given to do is a demonstration of how casual the actress is about an affair, and she wears a short, straight hairdo—the most disfiguring star coiffure since Mia Farrow’s thick wig in The Great Gatsby….”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, October 12, 1981
Taking It All In, pp. 237-240