Stanley Kauffmann

[haven’t read all this one]:

“The Susan is Meryl Streep. I've been fervent about her since her drama school days, but I think her performance here--excepting Still of the Night, which was just a blip on the screen for all concerned--is her least successful film work to date. This is a relative statement, relative to Streep's gifts, which easily embrace the emotional range of this role. But her voice sounds limited, uninflected, insufficiently interesting. Vocal richness has long been a problem for her, I think; and here she is surrounded by English actors brought up in a tradition where the voice is not just a means of making words audible but is the instrument with which acting begins. That tradition is not one of hammy scooping and gliding but of belief in the magic of the word itself and of the finest shades of inflection. Streep has several big scenes to play with John Gelgud, the emperor of this tradition; one long scene with Ian McKellen, who is very adept in it; and a great deal to play with Charles Dance, who is decently competent in it. All of them, merely by using their techniques truthfully, make Streep sound vocally lackluster. Even Tracey Ullman, a young woman of limited experience, has, simply by virtue of an ear conditioned to England's English, more color than Streep. Unlike Streep's work with accents in Sophie's Choice and The Seduction of Joe Tynan, she seems here so concerned about merely sounding English that it absorbs much of her imaginative energy. (Her English role in The French Lieutenant's Woman was in a quite different vein--lush romance.)….”

Stanley Kauffmann
New Republic, Aug. 12&19,
1985?

(partial retraction later? He lists this perf among her good ones)