James Wolcott

“In Plenty Meryl Streep peers pensively through many windows…. [lo, get] Pale and choleric, Streep's Susan seems to be glaring at the whole dreary postwar scene from a glassy remove--her eyes are another set of windows. And into those windows the audience peeks, hoping to discover what turned Susan into such a royal pain. Socially, Susan Traherne is a room-clearing terror; she creates quarrelsome scenes, ….[LO, get] (she has the acid touch of Virginia Woolf's snobbery without Woolf's compensating genius). Yet Plenty doesn't see Susan as an overzealous pill squandering her energies in petty squabbles--it presents her as a wild electric charge in an era of moral deadness. She's like Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, fed up with stale air and hypocrisy, and raging. Idealism has made her half-mad because she can find no liberating outlet for it. She's a rebel without a cause.

“That's the premise, and to paraphrase Johnny Carson, if you buy the premise, you'll buy the movie. I didn't and I don't….

“Kate Nelligan, who originated the role of Susan Traherne on the stage, had a great blood-flush of temper and a rib cage of steel; her furies made the walls rock. By comparison, Meryl Streep's Susan seems more brittle and easily manageable. In Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, there's a church called Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, and Meryl Streep, devout and serious, is Plenty's patron saint of perpetual responsibility. One can almost see her up there on the altar, surrounded by votive candles, clutching an Oscar in each hand. She works hard, but there's too much waxy yellow buildup on her martyrdom. Only once, when Streep is excitedly pulling off her earrings at a dinner party, does she squirm out and begin to burst the confines of her devotional calling. [As I had read his review, perhaps incorrectly, Wolcott earlier called the dinner party scene, apparently viewing it as a whole, "the worst scene in Plenty."] Yet if Susan had been played by Nelligan or Vanessa Redgrave (another powerhouse), Plenty still would have insurmountable problems. Motivationally, it's just too underrealized, too withheld, too darkly cryptic. There are no dancing skeletons in this movie's closets--only moths flapping their musty wings.”

James Wolcott
Texas Monthly, October 1985