Hal Hinson

“…. But an actor doesn't have to be English to talk nice. Meryl Streep is American, and throughout the whole movie she talks in an English accent just as good as that of most of the people who speak the real thing, except maybe for John Gielgud… , and a lot better than some, like Sting…

“As Susan, Streep manages something quite astonishing: She plays out her character's actions in each scene, without ever actually creating the character. You're aware that you're watching a performance, but nothing is coming across. It is as if her speakers were out. We follow Susan across the course of her life, but, from scene to scene, there is no emotional continuity, and, in the true sense, the character exists only in separate pieces. We know, of course, what the character is supposed to be feeling, at least in most cases. Streep portrays Susan's rage and disillusionment without conveying it, as if she were intentionally allowing herself to express only the surface details of the character. In the production notes for the film, Streep talks about how she "loved her anger and the size of it," but we never feel it. When at one point in the film she explodes at the young man (Sting) she enlisted to get her pregnant (without success) by firing a round of bullets from a pistol into the wall above his head, her action comes as a shock.

“The problems with Streep's performance in the film are compounded by the filmmakers' inability to make up their minds about what they really think of Susan. Plenty is about the long, painful slide from the mountaintops of youth, about lost ideals and unfulfilled promise. The film is a tragedy, and Susan is its tragic heroine….

“On one level, Plenty is a bull-in-a-China-shop movie, with Susan rampaging through the stuffy calm of the English bourgeoisie. Susan makes demands on the world, but it is uncertain whether Hare sees them as unrealistic demands. At one point, when Susan disrupts a dinner party by announcin her violent disagreement with British actions in the Middle East, Hare suggests that her malcontentedness is the result of a superior moral sensibility--the legitimate response to the English tendency to push things under the rug…. On the other hand, Susan simply seems uncompromising, destructive, and ill-equipped to deal with the real world. [ellipsis joins ideas sufficiently?] She's too good for the world in the same way the "angry young men" of a somewhat later period were. She's like John Osborne's Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, but without his tantalizing animal vigor or his language. Porter also thought of himself as a big man trapped in a role which was too small for him, but Osborne didn't ask us to look at him as a hero. He knew he was a loudmouth and a heel. But at least Porter let us know what he stood for (endlessly). In Plenty, Susan's concerns appear to be as much about a romantic nostalgia for the past as anything else. Not only is she a rebel without a cause, she doesn't have much of an agenda either.

“Susan might have been a truly compelling figure if Hare had enabled us to empathize with her suffering and, at the same time, show us it's not good enough that she is in pain, that her self-indulgence and violence are unforgiveable. [Can’t we see that anyway?] But Hare, and the movie, are too concerned with making the character sympathetic, and in doing so they steal her thunder. Instead of a genuine heroine, she becomes the poster child for post-war disillusionment.”

Hal Hinson
St. Louis, September 1985