After Listening to Meryl Streep on Teri Gross

I listened to Meryl Streep being interviewed on Fresh Air yesterday while I was driving to karate, a couple days after Donna and I went out on a snowy night to see her in The Iron Lady. Like many, I consider her to be, if not the best there is, then so close that it really doesn't matter. If I were dying, stuck in prison, stranded on an island somewhere that had decent power and access to Netflix, I can think of few better ways to idle away my precious hours than to watch her and Stanley Tucci in Julia & Julia, again and again and again.

So it kind of hurt my feelings when she told Teri yesterday that most men, unless they're gay, don't get any of her roles except the one where she played Linda in The Deer Hunter, a role that she was good in, excellent perhaps—a breakthrough role—but one that really doesn't stand out for me. Certainly not in the way that Robert Deniro stood out, or Christopher Walken, all the Russian Roulette stuff in Nam, and getting drunk and going on a deer hunt, and all the other shit in the movie that guys really get into.

Frankly, I remember the guy who played Axel better than I remember Meryl Streep in that movie. Which wouldn't flatly rule out the possibility that I'm gay (and just won't admit it), but couple that with the fact that I haven't seen Mamma Mia, and it would seem at least plausible that I might be one of those rare straight guys who like her, and get her, in pretty much all her roles.

Even the one, in Kramer vs. Kramer, where she plays the mother who runs away from her family, then wants to come back again after Dustin Hoffman has made the kids pancakes and taken them to school and done all kinds of other things that have him coming off as a fucking saint, while she, to a more common sensibility, comes off looking like shit—hey, I can understand that whole dynamic a lot better than Streep might imagine. Just sayin.

And I liked Out of Africa, way more than even a lot of gay guys I have a feeling. And not just for the landscapes, and the flying around in bi-planes, and Robert Redford—he and Paul, now those were some men. And I admire women like Isak Dineson, and Katherine Hepburn (who, as it turns out, didn't admire Meryl Streep, probably due to some deep-seated female-type bitchiness that I wouldn't understand, being a straight male), Beryl Markham, Amelia Earhart, the character Streep played in The Devil Wears Prada, where Stanley Tucci was, once more, great, if too short, and bald, for me, if I were gay, but alas ...

Madonna, can't forget Madonna ...

Can't see the point in being married to, or deeply involved with, any of them, I have to admit. Any more than Robert Redford's character in Out of Africa, before he died (like single men who want to fly around and do whatever they damn well please should, and will, if they don't settle down and get married and learn to love the joys and pleasures that can come, in rare situations, from commitment and domesticity), could see the point in actually staying put with Isak Dineson, great sex and food and Mozart on the Victrola notwithstanding.

But, having reflected further on Streep's remarks to Teri (very un-straight male of me, pondering such things while doing crunches, punching/kicking a bag—perhaps I should see someone about this), she did say it wasn't meant to be a generalization—though it certainly seemed like one to me: men, if they're straight, don't get my roles like women, and gay men, do—that really the crowd she was getting at were the male critics ...

Who, based on the reviews I've seen of The Iron Lady, haven't been as appreciative as, I think, they should have been.

Thus, she may have a point.

While many of the reviews say, in general, to see the movie for the performance rather than for the movie itself, since, well ... they aren't sure what the point of portraying this great woman (whom many of them probably hated, given their politics, or don't remember as well as they think they should, given their politics, and worldly sensibilities) in her senescence, looking back on her life with her husband (Jim Broadbent, reprising his role, partly as a ghost, as The Great Woman Who Is Losing Her Mind's husband [see: Iris—another film that no self-respecting straight man, even a writer, would be caught dead at, especially in a theater by himself, when he could otherwise be watching football, or Ultimate Fighting, but don't get me started], who is dead, talking to her, cracking jokes, being charming in smart, clever ways while often pointing out how selfish she could be, neglecting her family and the like, subtext being: as all kinds of men in the same position, with the same ambitions, would be, though that key isn't banged too hard, lest the movie be an obvious sort of polemic that even a straight guy might get, and get bored with, and want to get out of there as quickly as possible, to get back to the flat screen and Ultimate Fighting ...

Suffice to say, there are many subtleties to the movie, many of them overlooked in the surfeit of safe, similar, three out of five star reviews, not all of them written by men, but most of them.

And the performance, which is flat out awesome (in the old sense of the word), and bang on if you remember anything of Maggie and those days, takes little turns on commonly remarked upon themes—the woman, if she doesn't want to be wiping teacups on her dying day, having to become more of a man than the men, and to what consequence finally?—that in lesser vessels might have been less interesting, and felt even dated. Instead, it feels Shakespearean. As full of equivocation as "MacBeth."

Streep, understandably, perhaps, was disappointed that this not too abstruse point seemed lost on many of our best male critics. Though, to be fair, it was lost on a lot of the women as well—who, as a bunch anymore, at least those who have made it to the perceived safety of The Club, aren't any more courageous, or smart, or inciteful, than the men. Not reliably. Even Pauline Kael, especially when she got in the door, could be obtuse on occasion. How could someone not like Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid? Redford and Newman ... music by Burt Bacharach, Katherine Ross, riding on the handlebars with her petticoats showing, BJ Thomas breaking into "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head" ... What kind of woman doesn't eat that up?

Yet, don't you have to admire a woman who doesn't? Who won't ... even if, as a straight guy, you wouldn't want to be married to them.

Leave them for the Jim Broadbents of the world. Who, sooner or later, if only on occasion, end up not quite what the Maggie Thatchers of the world had hoped they'd be.

And there's the rub.

Imagine fighting over who does the wash and the dishes with someone like Pauline Kael or Maggie Thatcher ... or Meryl Streep, for that matter. You'd just end up doing it, all of it, to spare yourself the brain damage, if you were a straight guy. Any guy, really. And then where would you be?

In the same position women, married to guys like those women, were in for years. Wondering WTF?

Donna and I saw another movie awhile back, The Descendents. Saw it at the Ellie Caulkins, at the Denver Film Festival. Afterwards, we were over in the Galleria Bar having a drink and this woman behind us was going on about how George Clooney's [Oscar nominated] character was "just weak." Why, it just made her sick ...

She didn't get it at all.

Donna and I looked at each other and didn't say anything.

I thought about that woman, that evening, the other day when I was driving to karate and heard Meryl Streep tell Teri Gross that men, straight men, didn't seem to get the full range of her roles, just the ones like Linda in The Deer Hunter, while women, and many of the gay men that presumably fussed over her, did. I listened to that and remembered that clueless middle-aged, well-dressed woman who should have known something by this time, going on behind us after The Descendents, about George Clooney's character—who, ironically, would have been one of those clueless men Streep was speaking of at the beginning of the film, but not by the end (Director, a man, straight: Alexander Payne, from Omaha, Nebraska), and thought: Meryl, be careful, and wake up ... there's plenty of clueless to go around.