Plenty

This is a film where you can get lost, wonderfully lost. Following Susan, the character created on the page by David Hare and on the screen by Meryl Streep, is a journey of gloriously unexpected ups and downs. It may be because the amazing Meryl Streep goes trough the analytic intellect of David Hare with her heart on her sleeve and I felt shattered and moved by the access she provided me into the heart and soul of her own personal labyrinth. To look back with regret and feel that memories of fleeting moments of extraordinary beauty can keep you going and see you through whatever hell fate seems determined to throw your way. Meryl Streep never looked this beautiful and the transparency of her missteps are a magic sweep of the most enthralling kind. Irrationaly sane. Like most of the great bipolar. They know, they've seen through. There is nothing ahead only behind and now it's too bloody late. The stages of Susan's journey, to the after war lands of plenty are framed by her own geniality - the character's and the actress's - Susan is overwhelmed by her own awareness, lonelier and lonelier, Meryl overwhelm us with her own sublime generosity. Fred Schepsi, the extraordinary man at the helm, keeps the puzzle open and clear. Like most works of art, not everyone will be ready to open up to this experience. Pretty frustrating let me tell you. I would love to share this experience with everyone.

"Plenty" is a film I watch as often as other people watch "It's A Wonderful Life" or the first "Terminator", yes, I know, I must be a very strange guy. I was a teenager when I saw "Plenty" on stage at the National Theater in London. I remembered the play vividly, Kate Nelligan's performance was sensational. Fred Schepsi's "Plenty" has a totally unique life of its own. We're allowed into Susan's mind and Susan has Meryl Streep's face. Her performance makes her character's intellect visible, cinematic. Intimidating, fascinating, extraordinarily beautiful performance. I think David Hare has written here one of the best female characters I've ever seen and Meryl Streep strips it of every pretense. She can lie even to herself but not to us. It is mesmerizing at times. A ping pong ball going through the character's brain as she listens. Alone, so alone in the world. She never expresses it with words although she, I think, is totally aware of it. The infuriating sense of being incapable to adapt, to belong. Wanting and not wanting. Mesmerizing! As if this wasn't enough, Tracey Ullman, Charles Dance, Sting, Ian McKellen and John Gielgud giving, perhaps one of the best film performances during the final part of of his life I felt rather lonely in my love for this film until I started reading some of the comments posted here and realized I wasn't all alone in the world. Nice to meet you all.

This is one film which has grown on me since I saw it on main circuit. It is an intelligent film, which demands a lot of active viewing. Aided with an incisive script by David Hare, it looks at Britain's history from the end of WWII, through to Queen Elizabeth's coronation the Suez Crisis, all counterpointed by the lead character, Susan Treherne (played, in I think one of her best moments, by Meryl Streep.) The film plays on the word "Plenty" and the hope for UK after WWII that there would be plenty - in itself ironic. It is also a study of a woman afflicted by bipolar disorder (manic-depression). This is not the focus of the film; in fact, it is never explicitly stated.... At the time portrayed, psychiatric illness wasn't acknowledged - it tended to be swept under the carpet.

Streep imbues Susan with a dignity, despite her liking to "lose control"; there are excellent performances by Sam Neill (Lazar, her war-time "love"), Tracey Ullman, Sting, Charles Dance (her long-suffering husband) and John Gielgud (as the diplomat who takes the fall for the Suez Crisis.) It's not an easy film, but worth watching and discussing. It must be one of the most underrated films on IMDb.

Do yourself a favour, ACTIVELY engage with this. Don't let this film be overshadowed by Meryl Streep's other films of this time, like the overrated Out of Africa. They don't hold a torch to this film!

I was moved by this film. I was aware of Kate Nelligan's performance as Susan Traherne in the original stage version, a lusty, glowing former Resistance heroine with a shattered psyche. In the film, Meryl Streep focused on a beautiful, disarming character's inconsistent control of the crazy energy lurking underneath.

Plenty could be re-released today on a double bill with the recently released Brothers. Both show the long-term effects of war, fought overtly and covertly, on combatants and those who love them. It is no secret that the soldier in Brothers wreaks havoc on his family after returning from one tour of duty too many in Iraq. "People with PTSD have persistent frightening thoughts and memories of their ordeal and feel emotionally numb, especially with people they were once close to."

So, one way to view and appreciate Susan Traherne and her effect on her husband, friends and co-workers is from this perspective within the context of their cultures.

This much-overlooked British drama opens with, literally fades in on, her days in WWII France. It follows her through the next 15 or 20 years, and ends with an aching scene from a past day when she thought tomorrow seizes nothing but good things for her. But nothing else in her life is ever as valuable, as dignifying or as exciting as the war. She is, maybe, a little insane. She divulges in one scene that she has a considerable issue: "Sometimes I like to lose control."

Fred Schepisi's obscure film stars Meryl Streep and it is a performance of daring delicacy. It is hard to play an irrational, maladjusted, quasi-suicidal woman with such tenderness or grace. She is oftentimes quite charming to be around for the other characters, and when she is letting herself fall short of restraint, she doesn't do it in the vein of those exclusive movie frenzy scenes but with a relatively pleasant imperativeness.

When she returns to England after the war, she makes friends with a round-faced, grinning imp played by a refreshing Tracey Ullmann. Another is Charles Dance's foreign service officer who is initially charmed by her casual, free-spirited lifestyle, and then marries her and becomes her permanent aggrandizer, putting up a barricade of composure and practically divine patience around her tantrums.

It is challenging to pigeonhole specifically what it is that disturbs Streep's character. Early on, David Hare's screenplay shepherds us to her own heuristic that after the valor and brazenness of the war, after the gallantry and the passion, it is beyond absurd to her to readjust back to normal life and endure the tedious small talk of civil commonality. Yet as the film proceeds in a clandestine manner of being episodic, we find there is something persistent, a little vicious, in the way she humiliates her husband at crucial times, constantly seeking to be tactless and incongruous. Ultimately, we gravitate toward his position when he eventually thunders that she is hateful and pitiless, and oblivious to those who have withstood her.

But then there is an postlude, moistened by the misty twilight of the most dismal hour of fall, and there is such despondence in the way she and another character both become conscious that nothing will ever graze them again the way the war did. This bit part-filled movie is conclusively not a assertion concerning war, or foreign service, or middle-class British, but just the story of this lost woman who at one time lived profoundly, and now finds that she is barely even living.

The performances grant one enthralling solitaire after another. Most of the pivotal instances come as different characters eclipse different scenes. Streep births a complete character around a woman who could have merely been a hit list of problems. Charles Dance has an unrewarding part, as her perpetually agonized husband who from the beginning seems like a very dull bureaucrat, but survives to show that he is respectable as well as foolish. Sting plays a commonplace young man who ineffectively tries to conceive Streep's child for her. John Gielgud has three small scenes and steals them all, which essentially is the story of his career. Plenty is written, acted and directed as a lather of refinement and delicate shrewdness, underneath which grows the revelation that life can often be futile, dull and depressing, and that there can be days, months, years, decades in accordance.