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| Plenty |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 100 |
| Public Rating: 7.43 (7 votes) |
Director: Fred Schepisi |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Drama |
Year: 1985 |
| Writer(s): David Hare |
| Reviewed by: Popcornonmyknees |
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Plenty is a movie about post-war optimism, the dream of world unity and peace, and how that dream and optimism was quietly shattered by the disillusionment that leading a mediocre lifestyle can force people into.
It’s a witty, dry, subdued drama. It’s incredibly brittish, emotions are barely ever shown. But just underneath this cool and calculated surface a tempest is brewing.
The film is about Susan Traherne (Meryl Streep), an English woman who works with the resistance during WWII. We watch her move through life, through various love affairs, attempting to change things, until she has a nervous breakdown. She marries a government official and eventually settles down into a life of British drawing-rooms in upper class homes, where she eventually goes mad, perhaps by choice.
But what’s so interesting about Plenty is that there are no scenes of typical madness. The movie is structured as a series of scenes that take place in offices, living rooms, hallways. Most of the action is off-screen. Susan doesn’t crash into walls, roll her eyes and throw fits (She does shoot a gun once, but that’s fairly early on, when she could still be helped.). In fact we don’t even see her “mad” scenes. We see the beginning of her breakdown, and then the after effect.
The film was a successful play by David Hare, who also wrote the screenplay. The diolouge is excellent in the way it is so brittle and sharp and yet so calm and cool. A lot of this is also due to the expert cast of actors. Charles Dance plays Raymond Brock, the government official who dates Susan and later marries her. He is in every way the ideal British bureaucrat. John Gielgud is excellent as Leonard Darwin, Brock’s incompetent superior.
But it is Meryl Streep that is the key to this film. Her performance is extraordinary. In her hands, Susan is not a likable character, nor should she be. She has an affair with another man, and uses her “condition” to coldly manipulate people to get what she wants. At one point later in the film she blandly informs a government official that she will kill herself if her husband is not promoted soon. Of course, this act is also a desperate cry for help, a plea to get out of the life she is caught in, but no one sees it like that, not even her husband.
The scenes were she breaks down are dignified, quiet, but intense. As if she were purposefully mocking the reserved and elegant way the British do everything. In fact, the whole film carries an intensity with it. As it progresses, we feel a tightening in the pit of our stomach that Susan simply won’t get what she wants. She seems to be in control, but we know from the dry, slightly forced smile on her lips that she’s trying to find a way out, searching for an escape or at least a temporary remedy. Everything she does and says seems to fit in well enough, but she’s always quietly mocking the people around her. Unfortunately, this is the most resistance that her courage can muster. She’s too afraid, of the others who rule her life, and of her own instability and neurosis, to ever actually escape. As a result, she is neither a hero nor a victim, but forever a prisoner.
One has to wonder if Susan’s madness is really there, or something she herself has invented in order to hide behind. In the same way Hamlet used insanity to cloak his odd behavior, Streep seems to suggest that Susan uses hers to rebel.
We can all relate to Susan. Sometimes the prospect of a life of mediocrity are more frightening than the terrors of the war. There was a time when Susan lived a life of courage and glory, as she fought the Germans. Now, she is suffocated by her world of plenty.
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