chaswe-28402 Meryl Streep plays an Englishwoman named Susan traumatised by experiences in Resistance France during WWII. The film then describes episodes in the continuation of her life during the following 20 years, from VE day to the days of the little sissies, and their farcical Empire medals. The transition is shown to be from trad jazz to the unmentioned yeah-yeahs, anachronistically represented by Sting. The peculiar title seems to be a response to the puzzling question: Have you had enough ? The neurotic, manic-depressed, bipolar, post-traumatic stress disordered, dissatisfied but beautiful Susan can be seen as a personification of disintegrating, crumbling, directionless, misguided, post-war Britain, a country that had lost an empire and failed to find a role. She takes several different jobs, and is ultimately unconstructively married to an unfortunate career diplomat named Brock. She gratuitously destroys his career, which was not especially promising however.There is no doubt at all that this is an exceptionally fascinating script and absorbing production. In order to try to get a grip on it I watched it straight through twice, in immediate succession. Morover I bought the paperback novelisation of the film, to try to help me sort out the various incidents. It was authored by an Andrew Osmond, which thoroughly mystified me. Could this really have been the well-known Andrew Osmond, founder of Private Eye ? He did serve in the Foreign Office for a time.One of the film's peculiarities is that its progress from one passage to the next in time occurs abruptly, with almost no connecting explanation. At one point there was a funeral, but I had no idea who was being buried. The sound was muddy on my DVD, and there were no sub-titles. I may be going a little deaf. Osmond's book made it clear that it was Susan's husband Brock's ex-boss, Sir Leonard Darwin, who was being buried. Was this the funeral of the Britain of the past ? With virtually no-one attending, because he'd resigned following the Suez fiasco and betrayal.Superbly directed, marvellously acted. Its meaning remains elusive. The closer the danger, the more vivid the life. I only dock one star because I saw no merit in Sting, or his role. After watching it through a third time I picked up some of the points I'd missed previously. This is truly a remarkable film

T Y I have known this movie now for 30 years. Almost no one I know saw it back in 1985. The one person who did see it didn't understand it, though he tried. His feelings were neutral, but his bewildered description intrigued me. He didn't get what I've got out of it all these years. I find it meaningful in different ways in each phase of my life, Now I see a strong message of the futility of trying to recapture the past, the intensity of the past, or one's youth. There is also a tacit reading of the film that the world grows less interesting over one's life, until one is left in a bland holding pattern. Each frame of the movie stands as a testimony to how much better things used to be, when you were young and feeling things intensely.The most generous thing you might feel about these character is confusion or ambivalence. You do not grow fond of them as the movie proceeds. Some of them are contemptible and/or dysfunctional. There is more to movies than liking the characters. This is a movie for thinking viewers, which were rare in 1985, and now all but gone.The movie is never jejune or coddling as later Streep movies are (Julia and Julia, The Devil wears Prada - weak filmmaking) and that's a testimony to capability of director Fred Schepisi, who seems to only film thoughtful scripts. Schepisi is a criminally underrated director. Schepisi also did good work on A Cry in the Dark, and really excellent work on The Devils Playground. As with all his movies this one is beautifully lensed, and the aspect ratio is very elegant.If anything is wrong with the movie it's that there's too much of the Charles Dance character (the bland, decent, diplomat husband) in it, especially in the last 45 minutes. He's not interesting, doesn't make a very good foil, and in some scenes seems to only exist as a device glue said scenes together.This is hard to track down, but is far better movie than Sophie's Choice, Silkwood, Out of Africa, where Streep played characters with more easily described dilemmas.

nomorefog Plenty' is one of those films that is difficult to like, even though you may feel obliged to admire it. It represents an allegory of some kind or another, which is something that I read about in a newspaper review. Well, I must have read about it somewhere, because as I was watching it, I didn't understand what it was supposed to be about and needed some assistance when it was all over.The deadly weakness of this film is that Meryl Streep plays a woman that any sensible person in the audience would want to strangle, because she is so completely selfish and bloody-minded. By the end of the film she has become mentally unhinged and I would challenge anyone to feel any sympathy with her plight. It may have been a good career move for Streep to play, at least on paper, such a non-standard type of female character, but for those of us in the audience, it is a bit difficult to make the connection to her. She literally appears out of nowhere at the beginning of the film; she appears to have no family; despite being middle-class to the backbone and having a good job, she is disoriented, mentally unstable and continually whining about how boring life is. She marries a man from the diplomatic service and takes a downward slide towards either schizophrenia or psychosis, I'm not sure which. They move to another country and she remains unhappily sedated for the rest of the film, after attempting to have a relationship with a working class lad and it coming to a bad end, apparently a dilemma indicative, according to many reviewers, of the inability of the post-war Atlee government to organise a truce between the classes in England. Personally, I was not convinced.The supporting cast is actually quite impressive, but they seem to have little purpose other than to stroke Streep's colossal ego. Sam Neill plays her contemporary during the French Resistance; Charles Dance is her sympathetic and put-upon husband, Tracey Ullmann is her best friend (and I didn't envy her the task) and Sting is the working class lad she cons into sleeping with her.I don't mean to sound so smug but I was not convinced by a word of 'Plenty' and disliked the experience. Basically, it's far too cold and cerebral for a commercial venture that has been presumably made to attract an audience. The story, if it could be called that, is contrived, and what the film is meant to be about is obscure. Streep is insufferable in an impossible role and I found the entire thing nasty, unconvincing and totally lacking in any entertainment value whatsoever.

pdk1 David Hare's brilliant stage play has been translated beautifully to the screen. The peculiar English trait of natural melancholy radiates throughout this sad exercise of seeing all through the lens of British class consciousness, repression and despair. The color photography, the performances, the stifling framing of the widescreen shots all add to the oppressive beauty of a story about the self-destruction of a preternaturally beautiful woman. Mery Streep has never been better before or since. Hare makes her intellectual acuity a weapon against herself as she sees through all the ghastly pretenses of a corroding Empire. No insight, no beauty of body, no letting go of formality and pretense can save her from herself. Feminism itself is taken to the burning stake as Streep's character thrashes, Hedda Gabbler like, against walls and prohibitions beyond her understanding. Rarely has such condemnation looked so ravishing.