"In my own words?" -- click text to watch scene |
"In my own words?" -- click text to watch scene |
“....Neither [Silkwood nor Gorky Park] is an ideal project for a movie, Silkwood being based on real-life incidents in the life of a shadowy martyr of our political mythology ... What pulls both pictures through are unusually strong and sensitive performances in the central roles. It is not surprising, therefore, that both movies work much better from moment to moment than from beginning to end….
“Meryl Streep, as Karen Silkwood, drove her car through the gate of the plant where she worked, parked, then headed across the lost toward her job; and I felt snug. Silkwood was going to be all right. In those first ordinary actions, Streep had once again done the miraculous, which is the daily work of fine actors: she had changed the unchangeable. When I last saw her, in Sophie's Choice, the core of Sophie had been innate, immutable. Now she has transmuted to another immutable.
“Thanks to Meryl Streep's brilliant characterization of Silkwood, we feel this awakening in our own, nonradioactive bones. Her Silkwood is no Okie version of Joan of Arc. She's a chain-smoking, hip-swinging, hair-mussing, wise-cracking girl who's careless about safety rules, swipes food from her co-workers' plates and flashes her bosom at gawking males. But the writers, Nichols and especially Streep turn this selfish "pain in the ass" into the complicated human being that she was, a girl who wanted to study science, who left three children behind with her separated common-law husband. Beyond these details Streep shows us a smart, sensitive woman with the constant jitters that come from deep frustration. It's a devastating irony that Silkwood only found a focus for her character and intelligence when she was contaminated by radioactivity.
“…. Streep, with her shag-cut brown hair and small mischievous eyes, plays Silkwood like the spoiled princess of Kerr-McGee, sashaying into work in short skirts and cowboy boots, blithely yanking open the foreboding steel doors. In the cafeteria, she's a flirty busybody, rummaging into her coworkers' lunches and business. At first, Steep's Karen notices things because she's smart and nosy and bored. Later she puts her snooping to work for the union, and when people start to notice her noticing things, she presses on in defiance. Working out all of Karen's feelings on the surface, Streep gives her lightest, least mysterious film performance: she paces briskly when she's outraged, and when her boyfriend moves out we watch her smile and shrug, bob her head from side to side, and pull compulsively at her hair. What keeps us from getting to know her as well as we might is the impoverished characterization in the movie, and its failure to let us forget, even for a moment, that she's a sacrificial lamb.”
“If this edition [1994] had reached print by, say, 1989, then surely it would have acknowledged Meryl Streep as the dominant actress in American pictures. At forty, she was not simply regarded as the most talented woman in pictures, but the most distinguished. Distinction is not common praise in movies, nor is it often well intended. The distinguished are somtimes those the public does not love: the term lay heavily on the heads of Olivier, Katharine Hepburn, and even Al Pacino, at times. But at the very end of the eighties, Streep had been brilliant, properly enclosed, and unquestionably Australian in A Cry in the Dark…. [B]ut some reckoned that Streep's presence was by then sufficient warning to wary audiences. She would be superb, rather cold, in a movie that had little vulgar magic. Even critics who admired her had grown weary of the complaint that in her highest flights of skill one felt the strenuous breathing of a mistress technician….
“Nichols is scrupulous in adhering to the known facts, refusing to,,, specify just what did get into Karen, both physically and psychologically. She remains something of an engima: How far was her paranoia justified?….
“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 screen relationship that Meryl Streep and Kurt Russell have created isn't hot-blooded; it isn't even very romantic. It's comfortable, and one recognizes the way it works at once: Karen's burgeoning strength will make Drew question his own bullishness, and the relationship will suffer. I've gotten good and tired of this post-feminist formula…, and I wish Kurt Russell had been given a chance to buck it…. When he and Karen are on the skids, it's Russell who draws the darker and sexier emotions to the surface; Streep is stiff, chilly--Streepish.
“For the role of Karen Silkwood… Meryl Streep not only acquired a brunette do and a twang but also equipped herself with something far more maverick: a dirty mind. In Silkwood… dirty thoughts race like minks across Streep's eyes, and the memory of an off-color joke always seems to be playing at the corners of her mouth. Streep doesn't confine her character's lewd energies to the narrow angles of her face, however; this is most full-bodied performance. She swings her rump like a truck-stop waitress saucing it up with the boys at the counter and, when confronted with authority, flashes her breast. Streep isn't very convincing as a down-home tease--unlike Debra Winger and Jennifer Beals, her body doesn't have a natural sass, and you're aware that her mind is telegraphing sexy twitches of movement southward--but her dedication and nimble, undisguised skill prove to be welcome in Silkwood, a movie in which the world is morosely pulling in on itself, retreating into the folds of death. Actressy as Streep is, she's reaching out to us, trying to establish contact, opposing her flesh against the movie's toxic drizzle. Once her small fire has been smothered, the movie slips off into a hushed, dreamless sleep….
“Poised and diligent, with her skewed Madonna features, Meryl Streep is the class valedictorian of the new breed of young movie actors. Streep is the embodiment of the modern, unversity-trained, classical actor. She slips into each new character with amazing proficiency, and each one--the Southern lobbyist, the melancholy Victorian, the memory-haunted Pole, the martyred nuclear worker--ap[pears to be equally within her range. Streep approaches her characters with a scholarly thoroughness. Her performances are meticulously footnoted; every detail is filled in. In her big roles, like Sophie or Karen Silkwood, where the performance requires an accent or a physical change, we felt the weight of research behind her transformation into a character. In this sense, Streep is the most intellectual of the new actors. Watching her on screen, we always sense her mind at work, calculating reacting, weighing her choices. As Karen Silkwood, she's never at rest; her eyes bounce from side to side in their sockets and she pulls feverishly on cigarette after cigarette. She's so high strung that you can almost hear the thoughts buzzing inside her head. But in Silkwood, Streep's moody restlessness isn't expressive. Her performance has a surface authenticity but her empathy with the character doesn't go very deep, and she never really comes to life.”
“As Karen Silkwood… Meryl Streep speaks in a coarse voice, wears her hair in a limp brown shag, and looks at men with a frankly appraising stare bordering on provocation….