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