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