A.O. SCOTT ESSAY


From the moment it was announced on February 2, Meryl Streep’s 16th Oscar nomination - best performance by an actress in a leading role for “Julie & Julia” - seemed both richly merited and a bit redundant. Of course she would! How could she not?

It is barely an exaggeration to say you can’t have an awards season without Ms. Streep, who has been enmeshed in roughly half of them since 1979, when she was nominated for best supporting actress in “The Deer Hunter.” She won that category the next year, for “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and was nominated in it once again, in 2003, for “Adaptation.” Those three supporting nods are filigree on top of the 13 nominations for best actress, which she won on her second try, in 1983, for “Sophie’s Choice.”

More than a quarter-century has passed since then, which may mean Ms. Streep is overdue for a third statuette. Since her last one Oscars have gone to Gwyneth Paltrow, Hilary Swank (twice) and many other younger performers, while Ms. Streep, 60, has been a patient and routinely passed-over Oscar-night presence.

Has she received too much recognition or too little? Trying to quantify an answer is just marshaling pseudoscientific data in support of a conclusion that is already axiomatic: Meryl Streep is the best screen actress in the world.

But she is also, unmistakably, a movie star. An eminent and admired actress for three decades, she has emerged in the last few years as a box office draw. “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Mamma Mia!,” “Julie & Julia” and “It’s Complicated” were all hits, and it is fair to say her participation in them was a reason.

Looking back over her work, you note a progressive lightening of tone, though not a relaxation of technique. The movies that established Ms. Streep as a formidable on-screen force were marked by heavy themes and deep, dark dramatic moods: Vietnam, divorce, the Holocaust, missing children, nuclear anxiety. Her filmography in the 1980s is an anthology of earnest, serious cinematic ambition.

Ms. Streep - grave, scrupulously attentive to the nuances of performance, imbuing every gesture with craftsmanship and respect for quality - was not only the star of so many of these ‘80s Oscar movies, but also the most recognizable embodiment of their aesthetic.

Which is not to say she was in any way a fixed presence. On the contrary, her hallmark in those years was her chameleonism. She mastered the accents of an astonishing array of regions and countries: western Pennsylvania in “The Deer Hunter,” Oklahoma in “Silkwood,” Poland in “Sophie’s Choice,” Australia in “A Cry in the Dark,” Kenya by way of Denmark in “Out of Africa.” And her temperament and physical appearance seemed as mutable as her voice. She was variously enigmatic, severe, wounded, butch, sylphlike and aristocratic.

But to say she disappeared into these roles is not quite accurate. Rather, she used the particularities of these disparate characters to reveal some essential facet of herself, an ineffable but unmistakable Streepness. In one of the few skeptical assessments of this elusive quality, Pauline Kael, reviewing “Sophie’s Choice,” suggested that Ms. Streep was too calculated to create characters of full and spontaneous humanity. “It could be that in her zeal to be an honest actress,” Ms. Kael speculated, “she allows nothing to escape her conception of a performance.”

Often, though, this thoroughness was a virtue, bringing to vaguely conceived, unevenly executed films (like “Sophie’s Choice,” and also “Out of Africa”) a discipline and clarity they otherwise would have lacked.

Beginning at the end of the ‘80s with movies like “She-Devil” and “Postcards From the Edge,” Ms. Streep began to reveal a playful, mischievous side that, joined to her formidable timing and technique, has blossomed in the past 10 years or so.

In her portrayal of Julia Child, the posture, the voice, the bubbly blend of ruthless drive and irrepressible joie de vivre are almost uncanny.

But these days impersonation is the province of every aspiring biopic star. Ms. Streep’s Julia Child is never anything other than a performance. We never forget we are watching Meryl Streep inhabiting a version of Julia Child, and it is our familiarity with Ms. Streep that makes her exploration of Child both credible and exhilarating.

The genius of Julia Child was to demystify her art, to insist that anyone could cook the way she did, and Ms. Streep does something similar. Not that any of us could act with such consummate skill . We can’t be Meryl Streep. And yet, whoever she is pretending to be at the moment, however she is, with sublime calculation and faultless craft, being herself, we can’t help but feel that she is one of us.