A exigência das veteranas em Hollywood por bons papéis como protagonistas parece estar surtindo efeito em tempos em que a representatividade é a palavra de ordem no cinema. Isso porque tivemos nos últimos meses ao menos quatro filmes que se sobressaíram dentro do circuito independente com mulheres maduras: “Reaprendendo a Amar”, “Aprendendo com a Vovó”, “Hello, My Name Is Doris” e, agora, “A Intrometida”.
Grande atriz, Susan Sarandon vive no segundo longa-metragem de Lorene Scafaria (“Procura-se um Amigo para o Fim do Mundo”) a sua melhor protagonista desde “Anjo de Vidro”, drama natalino produzido em 2004. Na superfície, a sua Marnie tem semelhanças com a Carol Petersen de Blythe Danner em “Reaprendendo a Amar”. São duas mulheres na faixa dos 60 anos que não sabem muito bem como aplacar a solidão advinda da viuvez, reavaliando as próprias funções em uma vida que não as surpreende mais.
No entanto, as semelhanças param a partir do momento em que fica evidente a personalidade mais expansiva de Marnie, que não tem qualquer dificuldade em se meter em assuntos alheios, como bem deixa explícito o título do filme. É um comportamento que sufoca a sua filha única Lori (Rose Byrne), uma roteirista com dificuldades para superar o fim do relacionamento com Jacob (Jason Ritter), um jovem ator que já está com outra companheira.
Diante da exigência de Lori para que tenha a sua independência respeitada, Marnie passa a estreitar os laços com outras pessoas, tentando justificar a sua presença a partir de um auxílio por vezes financeiro para quem não tem a mesma fortuna que a sua. A primeira a contar com as suas generosas contribuições é Jillian (Cecily Strong), colega lésbica de Lori que teve um casamento feito às presas e que agora terá a chance de celebrar como deseja em uma festa de mais de 10 mil dólares totalmente bancada por Marnie. Outro a ter a sua ajuda é Freddy (Jerrod Carmichael), vendedor de uma loja da Apple que conta com as caronas de Marnie para se deslocar até a faculdade iniciada recentemente.
Mesmo partindo de um registro mais cômico do que dramático, surpreende como Lorene Scafaria (também autora do roteiro) não ridiculariza Marnie por estar em uma posição privilegiada diante dos personagens secundários. Claro que a protagonista terá o momento em que ouvirá algumas boas verdades sobre o seu comportamento a partir das consultas com a mesma terapeuta de sua filha, Diane (Amy Landecker). No entanto, isso não reduz a sua benevolência natural, a sua amabilidade com o próximo.
Outro fato que traz maior interesse ao filme é o seu tom de crônica, oferecendo uma perspectiva crível de pequenas cenas do cotidiano que irá gerar uma proximidade muito especial com o público da terceira idade, inclusive no interesse amoroso de Marnie com o policial aposentado Zipper (J.K. Simmons). Não que o espectador mais jovem seja incapaz de ter empatia por uma história que também destaca a cumplicidade na relação entre mães e filhas.
Streep rules the Oscars and the box office without a trace of movie-star egoCREDIT: MARY ROZZI / CONTOUR
Franchises may be king at the box office now, but the age of the movie star isn’t over quite yet. There’s one actor whose five most successful films of the past 10 years have made £132 million in UK cinemas alone, and just shy of £1 billion worldwide.
Not one of those films is, or even has, a sequel: in fact, all are one-offs aimed at older audiences, and fall into such styles as middle-age romance, television chef biopic and other genres liable to bring studio executives out in night sweats. These five films have only two things in common, but they’re arguably related. One is that they all made more money – significantly more – than almost anyone expected. The other is that they all star Meryl Streep.
Her latest project, a biopic of the notoriously awful opera singerFlorence Foster Jenkins, seems unlikely to break the Streep Streak. Reviews thus far have all been positive, but more importantly, in front of a full house, it kills. When the Telegraph hosted a preview earlier this month at the Curzon Mayfair in London, Streep’s screeching septuagenarian soprano brought the house down.
As far as Hollywood is concerned, this makes Streep a problem – or at the very least, a puzzle. She must be doing something right, but no one quite seems able to work out what. It’s not as simple as her being a great actress – although judged on Oscar nominations alone (she has a record-breaking 19), she’s the best ever; and on wins (three), only four-time honouree Katharine Hepburn ranks higher.
Streep's latest project is a biopic of the opera singer Florence Foster JenkinsCREDIT: PHOTO NICK WALL
But awards don’t necessarily equal popular success, as Streep herself could tell you. Between 1979 and 1991, she was in the running for an Oscar more often than not: two wins and seven further nominations in 13 years. Her performances had been transformative, suppressed thunderstorm stuff in a string of steely literary adaptations and biographical dramas such as Ironweed, Silkwood and A Cry in the Dark. (Psychological precision was an early Streep trademark; note-perfect accents was another.)
Only three of those films, however, could be described as hits, and those were the Best Picture winners:The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer and Out of Africa. Here’s the tricky bit: the characters that drew Streep’s eye in her first decade on screen just weren’t all that lovable – and something actresses have to deal with that their male counterparts don’t is that audiences love to be able to love them. Streep’s exasperation at this may have come to a head in 1990, when she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as a frazzled actress fresh out of rehab in the Mike Nichols comedyPostcards from the Edge.
She lost to Julia Roberts, who won for playing the happy hooker with the polystyrene smile in Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman. That film’s success evidently grated on her, and understandably so: it’s a supposed “women’s film” that endorses and reinforces every male sex and power fantasy in the book.
“I am upset that 15-year-old girls want to go see that four and five times,” she told an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times that year, while Pretty Woman was running rampant at the box office. In a speech to the Screen Actors Guild that August, she observed that Hollywood’s predilection for certain types of female roles was cheating actresses out of opportunities their male counterparts enjoyed for life.
“In a season where most of the female leads are prostitutes, there’s not going to be a lot of work for women over 40,” she said. “Like hookers, actresses seem to lose their market appeal around that age… [when] most male actors are just approaching their peak earning potential.”
Her speech was partly prompted by a recent survey that had revealed women over 40 accounted for only nine percent of all American film and television roles in 1989. (Streep herself had just turned 41.)
“In 20 years,” she predicted darkly, “we will have been eliminated from movies entirely.”
Twenty-six years later, Streep seems to have proven herself wrong. But has she? While she may be enjoying unprecedented popularity with audiences, her 45-year career remains an anomaly – so much so that Tina Fey joked at the 2014 Golden Globes: “Meryl Streep is so brilliant in August: Osage County, proving that there are still great parts in Hollywood for Meryl Streeps over 60.”
In short, Streep is currently in more or less uncharted territory. By her mid-60s, even the mighty Hepburn had been largely typecast as what the critic Andrew Britton memorably described as “either a devouring mother or a batty old lady”.
The eccentric, Britton continues, “is a readily available category for an ageing woman who is not defined by the company of men”. But while Streep’s recent roles tend towards eccentricity – and Florence Foster Jenkins lunges at it – menfolk are often a central part of the equation. The difference is her characters aren’t defined by them: they are by her.
Streep (centre) as the hotelier Donna in Mama Mia!CREDIT: PHOTO: PETER MOUNTAIN / UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Take those five, £1 billion-grazing films mentioned above. The biggest of the lot, 2008’s Mamma Mia!, has Streep as Donna, a hotelier whose dormant love life rushes back into full and ribald wakefulness in the build-up to her daughter’s wedding. Her life becomes so flushed with fun that in one now immortal shot, we see her perform jumping splits while bouncing on the spare bed. (Streep did the splits on set for real, off the cuff and in the moment.)
Then there’s the double-biopic Julie & Julia from 2009, in which Streep plays the TV chef Julia Child, whose highly satisfying marriage to her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) is a logical extension of her appetite for the rich, all-pleasure, no-guilt French cuisine with which she makes her name.
In the same year, she also made It’s Complicated, a love-triangle comedy in which Streep’s bravura pâtissière is romanced by her hotshot lawyer ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) and a puppyish architect (Steve Martin). In her mid-60s, Streep is taking cinema into the kind of DEFCON 1 scenario for which Hollywood has no contingency plan. She’s making middle age sexy.
After the Florence preview screening, I asked Streep how she goes about choosing her roles. “If someone interesting is in a story, I fall in love with her, and I have to feel like her, and I have to be her,” she replied. “I don’t think there’s a particular kind of woman I like to play. But I would like to see what it’s like to be a man.”
It’s significant that all five of those lucrative Streep hits – the three above, plus the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady and the scalding high-fashion satire The Devil Wears Prada – were written by women, and that all but one (Prada) were directed by women too. Throughout her career, Streep has frequently tweaked male-written characters to give them a plausibility and depth they’d hitherto lacked
On the custody drama Kramer vs. Kramer, she rewrote her character’s entire courtroom testimony. Her co-star Dustin Hoffman was reportedly livid, and no wonder: in that one brief scene, Streep steals the entire film from under his feet. The original novel painted her character, Joanna, as a self-centred shrew whose motivation for leaving her six-year-old son was muddily vague. Streep snapped it into focus – and when Joanna takes the stand, her gently spoken words smash every preconception we have of her into a pulp.
Streep’s determination to do right by her characters extended to her first foray into comedy in the early Nineties. That period is crucial for two reasons: it came at the end of her most concentrated run of awards nominations, and it coincided with her turning 40, which she was well aware was the industry’s preferred retirement age for actresses.
Streep’s determination to do right by her characters extended to her first foray into comedy in the early 1990s. That period is crucial for two reasons: it came at the end of her most concentrated run of awards nominations, and it coincided with her turning 40, which she was well aware was the industry’s preferred retirement age for actresses.
Few would rank She-Devil and Defending Your Life as top-tier Streepiana, but a robust argument could be made for 1992’s Death Becomes Her, directed by Robert Zemeckis, a merciless grotesque satire of Hollywood’s morbid fixation on youth. Streep’s earlier work made her an obvious choice for the part of Helen, the film’s mousy jilted housewife. Instead, she played Madeline, a glamorous but yellowing starlet who knocks back an elixir of life in the hope she’ll remain forever young.
Even here, Streep tinkered with the script, drawing out the macabre tragedy of Madeline’s predicament, and further whetting the film’s satirical edge
Streep’s questing persistence to play against type twice over – as the vamp in a wacky special-effects comedy nobody thought she could pull off – is one reason Death Becomes Her is such an enduring pleasure. But it may also be the secret of her newfound popularity.
Compare Streep’s career arc with those of her contemporaries – by whom I don’t mean other actresses around the same age, but her fellow New Hollywood metamorphoses, like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. (It’s no accident that they tend to be men: Streep plays the kind of roles that are almost never written for women.)
To an extent, De Niro and Pacino have both been left stranded by their success, perpetually trading on earlier work, if not regurgitating it. De Niro’s gross-out comedy Dirty Grandpa only makes sense (and I use the term loosely) if you’re aware of the respect its star commanded in the past. And part of the point of the low-key drama Manglehorn was the spectacle of a Pacino-sized actor in a humble role.
Streep doesn’t need to do this. There’s no persona to cash in on or subvert. To enjoy Mamma Mia!, you don’t have to be able to quote “a dingo’s got my baby”. The oft-cited sticking point with Streep – and for the legendary film critic Pauline Kael; it became a fixation – is that her technical precision leaves her characters’ souls frozen out. As Kael wrote in her review of Silkwood: “She doesn’t seem to know how to draw on herself, she hasn’t yet released an innate personality on the screen.”
It’s easy to wonder if Kael’s exasperation with Streep stemmed from the fact that her brilliance doesn’t come at an obvious cost. If we don’t feel that her own soul is on the line, perhaps that’s because we don’t know much about it. Her home life seems blissfully ordinary (she’s a mother of four and has been married to the sculptor Don Gummer for 38 years) and isn’t much discussed. And her on-screen transformations, dramatic as they are, don’t entail any macho self-abasement. No Method madness or “uglying up”: just lived-in plausibility. (She told me that to prepare for Florence Foster Jenkins she took to singing around the house, but her family stopped her: “It’s so humbling, if you’re a big movie star, to have children.”)
Acting her co-stars off the screen isn’t Streep’s style. In some cases, she more or less acts them back onto it. It’s no coincidence that Hugh Grant gives his best performance since Four Weddings and a Funeral in a Streep film.
I asked Streep what she made of the current craze for difficult acting. Is a role that was obviously a struggle – say, Leonardo DiCaprio’s ordeal inThe Revenant – more valuable than a performance that seems to slip past as spontaneously as life?
“Leo DiCaprio only fought an imaginary bear,” she replied, with a barely detectable twinkle. “Hugh had to listen to me singing for real.”
Florence Foster Jenkins is released in cinemas on Friday
“Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.” ― Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor Promoting Cleopatra 1962 Photo Bert Stern
No actress in Hollywood exudes the glamour of Elizabeth Taylor, who would have been 84 yrs old today. From child star to AIDS activist, from ingénue to the woman who ‘stole’ Debbie Reynolds husband, Eddie Cantor, Dame Elizabeth Taylor was larger than life. Famous for her tumultuous relationship with Richard Burton who she married twice. Of course, her iconic portrayal of Cleopatra; many associate her with that film, but in truth she really didn't enjoy making it, except for meeting Burton of course.
Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8
Her filmology was extensive and among my favorites was her Academy Award winning portrayal of Gloria Wandrous, the call girl who could not be bought, in Butterfield 8 (1960), feisty Maggie “the Cat” in the Tennessee Williams adaptation of A Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, (married to Brick, a man who seemingly loved another man) played by Paul Newman and set in the deep south.
Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly Last Summer 1959
Her portrayal of Catherine in Suddenly Last Summer (1959), who was being driven mad by her Aunt Violet (Kate Hepburn) isn't as well known but brilliantly acted.
Elizabeth Taylor in The Sandpiper
The movies I watch at least once a year sicne her passing are the Academy Award winning “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, (1966) the adaptation of Edward Albee’s play where she knocked it out of the park as the boozy aging Martha, the vitriolic wife of history professor George (Richard Burton) and The Sandpiper (1965) perhaps a metaphor for her own life; she portrayed a sensitive artist, whose own wings were broken (co starring Ricahrd Burton).
Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor (husband #4 and formerly married to Debbie Reynolds) Wedding 1959
“You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal.” ― Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor with husband Michael Todd (no 3) 1957
Married 8 times, it is said that she loved Michael Todd unequivocally and never got over his death when he died tragically in an airplane crash in 1958. She loved him so much she converted to Judaism “I, Mrs. Michael Todd, née Elizabeth Taylor, do declare in the presence of God I seek the fellowships of the people of Israel,” and remained Jewish until her death in 2011.
Elizabeth Taylor (no makeup) with husband Richard Burton
Big girls need big diamonds.”― Elizabeth Taylor
White Diamonds Ad 1991 A Girl Can Always Have More Diamonds (2009 Hall of Fame Fragrance Foundation Awards) photo-Courtesy of The Fragrance Foundation
There is so much to write about Elizabeth Taylor’s life more than can fill a single post. She was a perfumista and it was rumored she wore Tuvache’s Jungle Gardenia during the filming of Cleopatra in 1963. Ms. Taylor built her own fragrance empire…mover over JLo, Britney and Madonna, White Diamonds, composed by Carlos Benaim in 1991, is the bestselling celebrity scent of all time. Whether by design or as a respite from her dramatic personal life, White Diamonds is a clean, soft white floral a little green and although oakmoss is listed in the notes along with lily, rose, narcissus, jasmine, tuberose; and a base of oakmoss and sandalwood; it smells to me like a happy fragrance and bit like an expensive soap you save for special occassions.
Elizabeth Taylor by Francesco Scavullo,1981
“I'm a survivor – a living example of what people can go through and survive.” ― Elizabeth Taylor
What I admire most about Elizabeth Taylor was her resilience. Despite drug and alchohol addiction as well as failing health, she dedicated her later life helping to raise awareness and money for HIV AIDS, which back in the 80s was too often a death sentence. She died at age 79 of heart failure but her legacy lives on forever ..her films, her beauty her glamour and no one in Hollywood today comes close.
Elizabeth Taylor Flipping the Bird
“You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot before the other, and God damn it, you refuse to let it get to you. You fight. You cry. You curse. Then you go about the business of living. That’s how I’ve done it. There’s no other way.”-Elizabeth Taylor
She's played everyone from Elizabeth I to Bob Dylan: is there anything the luminous Australian actress can't do?
10. Bandits (2001)
In no other context will we get to watch Blanchett madly chop vegetables while dancing her face off to "Holding out for a Hero"; get in a car blubbing and sing along pathetically to "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on the stereo; and then run over Billy Bob Thornton. And all this in her first five minutes!
Barry Levinson’s heist-comedy-come-love-triangle was a fast fade, culturally speaking, but it used Blanchett well as a desperate housewife dragged into criminality by Thornton and Bruce Willis, two escaped convicts who have no idea what she’s capable of. It’s no surprise that when Blanchett mucks in for this boysy sort of exercise – a rare event – she manages to walk off with the whole film in her clutch purse.
9. Veronica Guerin (2003)
In one of her more controversial, critically divisive leading roles, Blanchett played the crusading Dublin crime reporter murdered by drug lords in 1996. She’s always come in for stick about the accent, which isn’t perfect, and the film’s wild lack of moderation can be laid straight at the door of Joel Schumacher, practically flinging armfuls of used syringes into every frame to establish he’s doing gritty.
Cate Blanchett as the journalist Veronica Guerin in the 2003 film
But there’s a real feminist potency to Blanchett’s acting here, which blazes and burns its way through an otherwise routine biopic. She makes Guerin single-minded, reckless and a right handful – a pill to deal with, not some unassailable martyr figure.
8. The Aviator (2004)
“Cate Blanchett plays Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming Howard Hughes biopic” were words that must have had the Academy’s engraving team twitching as soon as they were uttered, and lo: Best Supporting Actress was hers.
Jude Law as Errol Flynn with Cate Blanchett's Katharine Hepburn in 'The Aviator'
The script doesn’t ask her to do much more than saunter through the movie, dropping mischievous asides about the male libido as she twirls a golf club, bickering with her family at lunch, and then ripping a plaster off the Hughes relationship. She nails Hepburn’s fluting charm and horsey disdain to a tee, without ever making it look like particularly hard work.
7. Elizabeth (1998)
Blanchett’s Virgin Queen was her first fully-fledged star turn, and she must have been just pipped to that Oscar by Shakespeare in Love's Gwyneth Paltrow. Her command of self-presentation in the role – by turns pleading and imperious, stricken and iron-lady-ish – is hard to beat.
Cate Blanchett played the Virgin Queen in 'Elizabeth'
At times – when dealing with Vincent Cassel’s cross-dressing Duc d’Anjou, say – she seems modern and amused only because the script wants her to be, perhaps uninvested in how the “historical” Elizabeth, a more daunting idea of a person, might have comported herself. Still, it’s a smart and fine-shaded interpretation, hoisting Shekhar Kapur’s frequently overblown film to can’t-miss status almost single-handedly.
As Mary Mapes, the producer whose 60 Minutes segment about George W Bush's military service threatened to destroy the reputation of CBS News in 2004, Blanchett returns to Veronica Guerin territory: a driven media career woman overtaken by the enemies she’s making with her current story.
Cate Blanchett as CBS journalist Mary Mapes in 'Truth'Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
This time, it’s professional disgrace, not physical violence, looming before her: it’s disappointment in herself that looms over Mapes like a black cloud, and Blanchett’s vigorous screen authority makes her fight for her reputation hugely compelling.
5. Oscar and Lucinda (1997)
“And introducing Cate Blanchett,” intoned Voiceover Man in the trailer for this underregarded Australian epic of the heart, a tale of two card-playing obsessives adapted from Peter Carey’s Booker-winning novel. Blanchett wasn’t a total unknown: she’d played Oleanna opposite Geoffrey Rush on the Sydney stage in 1992, done some Australian television, and taken the supporting role of a PoW in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road (1997).
Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes in 'Oscar and Lucinda'Credit: United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo
But director Gillian Armstrong will always take the credit for identifying her luminous potential as a leading lady, and betting the house on it. Blanchett as ingénue, opposite a never-more-spirited Ralph Fiennes, was thrilling to watch when it first opened: going back to this flushed and tender romance is even more tempting now.
4. Blue Jasmine (2013)
Not since Annie Hall had Woody Allen given one of his leading ladies this plum a part: Blanchett tucks into it like a starving pauper confronted with an all-you-can-eat buffet. Jasmine French, the deluded socialite driven from luxury when her husband’s dodgy dealings are exposed, is tragicomic, vain, moving and ridiculous, often all at the same time.
Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen's 'Blue Jasmine'
Despite the Oscar, you wouldn’t necessarily call it Blanchett’s subtlest work – it’s Great Big Acting, is what it is, a showcased turn which still galvanises its film unstoppably and made itWoody’s best in about two decades. She finds plenty of contrast between the oblivious dreaminess of the flashbacks, the snobbish horror of her new circumstances, and that cruel swoon of hope when Peter Sarsgaard’s character turns up. For most actors, this belter of a performance would be a unanimous career best, so trust Blanchett to have given us three even better ones.
3. I’m Not There (2007)
Of all the faces of Bob Dylan paraded before us in Todd Haynes’s group-session-portrait of the artist, Blanchett’s was the one which captured everyone’s imagination the most vividly. This wasn’t just because of the cross-gender gimmick: she was the Dylan-est Dylan on screen, somehow both the most specific and least knowable, and precisely specific because of her unknowability.
Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in 'I'm Not There'Credit: Weinstein/Everett/Rex Features
Her wary stand-offs with Bruce Greenwood’s BBC interviewer are the absolute heart of the film, and it almost felt as if Blanchett on Dylan was a variation on Blanchett satirising Blanchett, given her famous refusal to suffer fools gladly in interviews.
2. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)
Anthony Minghella gave a lot to cinema, but if you were to choose one small, elegantly wrapped gift above all others, it might be the role he created for Blanchett in the ensemble of his finest movie. It takes a real understanding of Patricia Highsmith’s universe to come up with a Meredith Logue – the textile heiress Matt Damon’s Ripley meets on his trip to Italy, whom he toys with, seduces and tricks to evade suspicion.
Cate Blanchett and Matt Damon in 'The Talented Mr Ripley'
Blanchett was Oscar-worthy in the part: she’s both exacting and brilliant company, drawing Meredith as a la-di-dah society gal who talks too much when she’s nervous, casts deep-alto shade on other characters (“eeeeverybody knows Freddie Miiiles”) and falls much too quickly and ruinously for Ripley’s devious charisma. In an immensely sad film, Meredith is one of the saddest things, carrying off her disappointment with a show of lightness we know is just saving face.
1. Carol (2015)
The essence of Blanchett is found in the flickering minutiae – the quick look, the half-smile, an exact, quizzical tilt of the head, the stress on a particular word. By all these yardsticks, Carol Aird, the unhappy socialite embarking on an affair with a younger woman in Todd Haynes's exquisite 1950s romance, might be called the quintessence of her craft: a performance built up from tiny moments, calibrated with more immaculate precision than ever before.
Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes's 'Carol'Credit: Wilson Webb
Her choice to play the film’s marital battle wearily, with a kind of defeated patience, cuts beautifully against expectation. Carol Aird saves her flagrant whims, her wit, and her little victories for strictly private consumption. In public she is, and knows she is, a tired charade, like a stage actor who’s played the same dutiful-wife role for years on end, and is all too obviously going through the motions.
