Enough for Meryl? Never

Doesn’t Meryl Streep have enough Oscar nominations? I’ve loved her forever but should she win for playing Margaret Thatcher? Can’t any one of us ladies tease our hair into a Buzz Lightyear helmet and get a film crew to follow us around the house talking to the pictures?Ah but that's mean of me. I love Meryl. Who has better skin, and a greater laugh? Who else dares sing and hop around on the Greek isle for that film version of Mamma Mia?Also she and I are the same age.The same height too.We’ve both also had our pictures taken by the famous Bachrach studio, the outfit that did the official portrait of JFK just after his election to the presidency. The Bachrach photographer who took my picture there told me she was a real challenge what with that crooked nose, but “What a face!” he said. “What a face!” The picture of me that day makes me look a cross between a mother superior and a flight attendant circa 1960. It would work propped on top of my casket someday, if it had a sign next to it saying “Really she looked nothing like this.”So it’s not that I don’t love Meryl. It’s just that she I wanted to see Keira win a chance at the prize, as I was saying yesterday.But the more I write here the more I see how irresistible Meryl is.I was watching Woody Allen’s Manhattan the other night and there she was lighting up the screen as Woody's ex-wife. And whenever I get brave enough to watch The Deer Hunter again it stops me in my tracks every time to see her in that final scene with her friends following the funeral of the Christopher Walken character, when they sing this song:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LwGt9d1-lU]She’s modest, you hear, from people who've met her and I bet she sighed on hearing the news of yesterday's Best Actress nomination. "Another pair uncomfortable shoes!" she probably thought. "Another night where even my scalp will ache from all that compulsory smiling!"Now I've just watched a scene from Sophie’s Choice, the 1983 film about a woman’s secret history and the way what she did, and saw, and endured, has changed her forever.Just watch it yourself now. What an actress! And how lucky we are to be living at the same time![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk7GWw7MagU]

Give That Girl an Oscar

I’m really hoping Keira Knightly is named for her role in A Dangerous Method when Oscar nominations are announced today. In this latest David Cronenberg film she plays a raging and distracted mental patient, who, when introduced to a calm empathetic listener sitting in a chair behind her, recovers clarity of mind and goes on to graduate from medical school and become a psychotherapist herself. (OK it’s also true that this calm empathetic listener sleeps with her too, then puts her aside when it suits him, but she expresses her feelings on these events in one blindingly fast three-second gesture that made the audience I was part of gasp with surprise.)But this is Jung and his onetime mentor Freud we're dealing with here, in the first decade of the last century when people were just getting the idea that they weren’t in Kansas anymore. Freud had just dropped his bombshell of a theory about the dark impulses involving sex and aggression that lurk just under the surface of our conscious thoughts – and as you can imagine, sex and aggression would rattle the teacups in any polite society back then, in those quiet years before the slaughter of World War I commenced.I’m wondering now if Freud’s ideas didn’t take hold more easily on account of that war, which killed an entire generation of young men and exposed how thin a veneer ‘civilized’ behavior really is.The losses from the "war to end all wars" were felt even over here in the States, however slow we were getting into it. It wasn’t just the speakeasies and the bathtub gin that made the Twenties roar, I don’t think. It was also the horror people felt after witnessing the carnage caused by trench warfare: A million casualties in the Battle of the Somme alone! They just wanted to forget it all. They roared too because Freud and his sometime protégé Jung had let this particular genie out of the bottle: no one in polite society had ever before spoken of our so-called baser impulses.In one of his plays 200 years before, Molière satirized the class of "genteel" people who refused to use the word for 'legs' – too coarse! Too vivid! They wouldn’t use the word 'teeth' either, calling them instead 'the furniture of the mouth.'But Freud and Jung? They kicked all that over. They kicked it into next week as the saying goes.The woman Keira Knightly plays was a real person named Sabina Spielrein, who suffered humiliation at the hands of her spanking-obsessed father, but then recovered just as she does in the film and contributed greatly to the understanding of our deepest impulses. (My heart squeezed shut when they rolled the credits to reveal that she and her two daughters were shot to death in a barn by SS officers. (They were Jews, as was Freud.))What I will remember is the image of her so sharply suffering at the beginning as Keira Knightly plays her. She writhes in the arms of the hospital orderlies; extends her already long lower jaw in a simian rictus of agitation. She looks like an animal being tortured. Poor young woman! Poor all women in those days when they called our anger “hysteria” and took away our humanity. Tough century, the 20th; thank God for every Suffragette and Feminist who worked to put things right.Anyway here's the trailer under one last picture of our girl:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjyP9DjUdVk]