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