Word: schepisi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although the film itself received poor to middling reivews, Tracey Ullam's performance as Meryl Streep's kooky, off-the-wall sidekick in Fred Schepisi's Plenty was very highly praised. That newcomer Ullam was able to work within the constraints of an exceptionally poor screen adaptation of David Hare's play and against the grain of Schepisi's generally sloppy direction is a tribute to her acting ability and potential...
Plenty, written by David Hare and directed by Fred Schepisi, traces the degeneration of Susan Traherne (Streep) from her work with the French Resistance in 1943 to her desertion of her husband almost 20 years later. Susan--part Joan of Archetype, part loony from Loonyville--is a bitter romantic who never got over her teenage crush on reckless idealism. During the war there was excitement to spare in her view of the British as parachuting | angels of mercy. Her one great moment of idealistic passion--in a tatty French hotel room with an exhausted soldier-hero--is the memory that...
...Schepisi's inexperience as a director complicates his handling of Streep's character, Susan Brock. Because she is so complex and passes through so many psychological metamorphoses, the audience needs some assistance in interpreting her within a single context. Schepisi's direction provides us with no help whatsoever, developing each individual sequence in a creative vacuum wholly severed from the rest of the film...
...career as the little--lost--activist. Once again, her most appealing characteristic is her chameleon-like control of facial expression. In one of the film's most fleeting but poignant moments (and probably the only one in which Baker's off-the-wall pacing has any effect), Schepisi moves directly from a shot of a glamourous Susan in her artsy Soho 'walk-up to one of her staring out of the window in a mental ward after the first of many nervous breakdowns. Scrubbed of all make-up and eroded with rivers of tears, Streep's pinched expression carries more...
...short, despite some fine performances by Streep, Ullman and Sting, Plenty is the fall season's most bitter disappointment. Had Schepisi and Hare been willing to sacrifice the artsy elements in favour of a more straightforward, biographical format, Plenty would have been more than enough...