Pauline Kael

“Meryl Streep gives a very fine performance as Karen Silkwood, considering she's the wrong kind of actress for the role. Since she has reached great heights of prestige, and many projects are offered to her, she's the one who's making the wrong choices--she is miscasting herself. There's a scene in Silkwood in which Karen and the other employees… are having lunch, and Karen, who likes to titillate her co-workers by showing them how freewheeling she is, nuzzles close to one of them--Drew (Kurt Russell), her lover--rubs his bare upper arm with her fingers, and then, swinging her hips and moving from table to table, starts to take a bite out of somebody else's sandwich. Meryl Streep imitates raunchiness meticulously--exquisitely. She does a whole lot of little things with her hands and her body; she's certainly out to prove that she's physical, and she seems more free here than in her other starring roles. But she hasn't got the craving to take that bite. If the young Barbara Stanwyck has grabbed that sandwich, we'd have registered that her appetite made her break the rules; if Debra Winger had chomped on it, we'd have felt her sensual greed. With Streep, we just observe how accomplished she is. She chews gum and talks with a twang; she tousles her shag-cut brown hair; she hugs herself; she eyes a man, her head at an angle. She has the external details of "Okie bad girl" down pat, but something is not quite right. She has no natural vitality; she's like a replicant--all shtick…. [That's how some Okie girls act, and you sense they're acting.]

“…. The most dramatic events in the various accounts of Karen Silkwood's life are circumscribed, because they're in contention (probably forever)… As a result, the movie is a series of suggestions and insinuations and evasions.

“What can be dramatized is the character of Karen Silkwood, and that could be enough, because, unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.) Karen Silkwood drank and popped pills and liked to play around. She had given her three small children over to their father, and at the time of her contamination she was going with Drew and sharing an apartment with a lesbian co-worker… She was--perhaps obsessively--centered on her duties as a member of the union's negotiating committee and worked gathering evidence to support her charges. She was a maze of contradictions, and a spirited actress could have made us feel what her warring impulses came out of. A woman who gives up her children is horrifying to many of us; we want to understand the sexual needs or the passion for freedom that drove Karen Silkwood to it, and how these emotions tied in with her union activism and the courage she showed in going against the company.

“Meryl Streep sensitizes the character and blurs her conflicts. She plays Silkwood in a muted and mournful manner--Karen's sad, flirty eyes show the pain of a woman who doesn't quite understand how she lost her children, and can never get over it. She's haunted by her loss; she's fine-boned and fragile--a doomed, despondent woman with many an opportunity to smile mistily through incipient tears. And… Mike Nichols, the director, soft-pedals everything around her…. [B]oth Drew and Dolly are in love with Karen; it's hard to know why, except that Karen is played by the picture's star. (They love Karen the way everybody in An Unmarried Woman loved Jill Clayburgh.)… Karen has a scene sitting in a porch swing and holding Dolly and comforting her, because she can't love Dolly the same way Dolly loves her. By that time, the movie has refined a potentially great woman character and turned her into a neurasthenic object of sympathy and adoration….

“…. [C]ompany officials come to the house that the three have shared; they find traces of plutonium there and accuse Karen of having deliberately contaminated herself so she could hurt Kerr-McGee. Karen reels off an elaborate explanation of how she was poisoned, and her words don't have the weight of thought. The scene is an embarrassment: Are we meant to think that she's lying, or is it just that Streep lost hold of the character? It's as if no one on the set were listening [I found it a great scene.]…. The capper to the director's uncertainty is the song Karen sings… Meryl Streep has a tender, scratchy singing voice, a little like Buffy Sainte-Marie's; her singing has more emotional lift than her acting--it's the only suggestive element in her performance. But "Amazing Grace"! It's the safest, most overworked song in contemporary movies.

“There's no vulgar life in Silkwood except for Diana Scarwid's Angela….

“Meryl Streep has been quoted as saying, "I've always felt that I can do anything." No doubt that's a wonderful feeling, and I don't think she should abandon it, but she shouldn't take it too literally, either. It may be true for her on the stage, but in movies even the greatest stars have been successes only within a certain range of roles. Katharine Hepburn didn't play Sadie Thompson or Mildred Pierce, and Ginger Rogers didn't appear in The Swan. Anna Magnani didn't try out for Scarlett O'Hara, Bette Davis wasn't cast as the second wife in Rebecca, and Garbo didn't break her heart over not doing Stella Dallas. Part of being a good movie actress is in knowing what you come across as. My guess is that Meryl Streep could be a hell-raising romantic comedienne. (A tiny dirty laugh comes out of her just once in Silkwood, and it's funkier and more expressive than any of her line readings.) She has the singing voice for musical comedy, and the agility and crazy daring for knockabout farce. And maybe she can play certain serious and tragic roles, too--she was unusually effective in her supporting role in The Deer Hunter. But in her starring performances she has been giving us artificial creations. She doesn't seem to know how to draw on herself; she hasn't yet released an innate personality on the screen.”

Pauline Kael
New Yorker, January 9, 1984
State of the Art, pp. 106-111