Irony died a thousand deaths when Meryl Streep was cast as a late-blooming actress in the third season of the hit crime comedy series Only Murders in the Building. Meryl’s infectious jumping for joy when she was belatedly cast as the nanny in the Broadway production only shows that she is a three-time Academy Award winner with a career spanning nearly 50 years.
(Also read: Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway reunite 17 years after The Devil Wears Prada, fans want to see them in sequel)
Meryl Streep as a mother
But throughout her career, Meryl maintained that she was a caring mother. In fact, she said motherhood has reduced her life to the bare essentials. “I need to know that there is a reason to take a break from the very difficult, exhausting and very interesting work of communicating with children and husband. Spending four months making a film is worth it,” Meryl told the Washington Post in 1998.
However, her characters will not agree with this. Try her latest role as Loretta Durkin, a struggling 70-year-old actress who gave up her newborn baby boy early in her career because she wanted to try acting. All these years later, although she still hasn’t found success as an actress either on stage or in Hollywood, her mother’s guilt has only deepened.
The mother who ran away
Loretta appears in her first Oscar-winning role as Johnna in Robert Benton’s 1979 film Krumver vs. Kramer. And in this film, her character leaves the boy with his father Ted (Dustin Hoffman), but no one knows where she went or what she did while she was gone. She returns only 15 months later to demand custody of their son. Was it a failed attempt at a career like Loretta’s that made her come back? Or did the mother’s guilt, fueled by the distance from the boy, force her to move closer to her maternal instinct? Only the disappointment in Meryl’s eyes when she leaves and the despair in her behavior when she strikes back tell us her story.
Sophie’s Choice
Meryl gave birth to her first child, singer-songwriter Henry Wolfe, the same year Kramer vs. Kramer was released. After winning her first Oscar the following year, the actress announced her arrival, giving Meryl the confidence to make smarter choices between acting and motherhood. But for Loretta, choosing between a new baby and a young career must have been similar to her role as her character in Alan J. Pakula’s 1982 psychological drama Sophie’s Choice.
In the period drama, Meryl had to choose who would live between her two children as the second was executed in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. And if she doesn’t make a choice, the same fate will befall both of her children. It’s every mother’s nightmare, and Meryl’s steely determination and heartbreaking vulnerability earned her her second Oscar. Interestingly, that same year Meryl gave birth to her second child, actor Mamie Gummer.
The mother who fell in love
Meryl has done it all—loved out of wedlock, been born out of wedlock, and slept with the broken half of a marriage—through her filmography. After her Francesca Johnson, an Italian World War II fiancée, begins a whirlwind affair with National Geographic photojournalist Robert Kincaid (Clint Eastwood) while her husband and children are away, in Clint’s 1995 film The Bridges of Madison County, she can’t don’t abandon your children. But years later, when she leaves them letters about her difficulties and loneliness, the children learn from their mother’s experiences and overcome difficulties in their marriage to focus on their personal lives.
Her children in Nancy Meyer’s 2009 romantic comedy It’s Complicated are not so understanding. They can’t wrap their heads around the renewed romance between their estranged parents, Jane Adler (Meryl) and Jake Adler (Alec Baldwin). But Meryl doesn’t stick to the soulmate narrative here at the expense of her children’s sanity, as she eventually recovers from residual feelings for her ex-husband and hopes to find new love in Adam Shaffer (Steve Martin).
In Phyllida Loyd’s musical Mamma Mia! In 2008, things take a much more bizarre turn as Donna (Meryl)’s daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) wants to find her father before her wedding. So she invites to her wedding the three men Donna slept with before Sophie was conceived. Meryl, who is busy being a mother here, isn’t too happy to see her ex-boyfriends. But the way she flirts with the young girl lost in her, only to rightfully give her daughter away at the wedding, shows how gracefully Meryl married the mother and woman within herself every time.
Working mother
In the sequel “Mamma Mia!” Ola Parker! Here We Go Again (2008), we learn Donna’s past and how her own mother Ruby (Cher), a musician, was never there for her as she was constantly touring. Meryl was that mother in Jonathan Demme’s 2015 musical Ricki and the Flash. Her name was Ricky Rendazzo, a name she took on as a rock star after abandoning her family. Her daughter’s suicide attempt brings her home, only to learn the harsh truth about being a mom from her children’s stepmother. Her mother’s guilt forces her to wait for her son’s wedding no matter what, but she still feels alienated in this domestic world.
“I never made any choice, I just got pregnant often. And when I finished weaning, I started reading scripts,” Meryl told the Washington Post. But on screen, Meryl had other priorities. As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida’s 2011 Oscar-winning film The Iron Lady, her character’s home was in ruins. Her obsession with her profession took a toll on her family life, just as it did in David Frankel’s 2006 cult classic The Devil Wears Prada. The breakdown of her marriage and the growing risk of becoming a single mother have left her vulnerable character Miranda Priestly presiding as an authoritarian in her office at a leading fashion magazine.
The mother’s guilt has passed.
However, Meryl’s most daring mother roles were those in which she played an incorrigible mother. In John Wells’ 2013 tragicomedy August: Osage County, her dying matriarch Violet Westin truly acted like a mother with nothing to lose. A drug addict, she did not even spare her children cruel truth bombs even days after their father’s death. She passed on her mother’s guilt to her children only to the extent that her eldest daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts) had to physically abuse her. When everyone abandons her, she doesn’t disappear like a frail old woman reflecting on her life, but like a lonely, desperate woman who drives around in a frenzy to find all the people she’s pushed away.
In her last memorable stint of motherhood, Andrea Arnold’s Big Little Lies season two saw her play the sumptuously twisted mother of dead son Perry (Alexander Skasgard) who wants to get to the bottom of his mysterious death, even if it involves her own. disputing his sister-in-law Celeste (Nicole Kidman), alienating her grandparents from their mother and denying rape survivor Jane (Shailene Woodley). “Is my grief too loud for you?” she asks Celeste after screaming at the top of her lungs. But like the rest of her career, the season finale ties her actions to her mother’s guilt. She passed on the guilt of her eldest son’s accidental death to her younger son, leaving him scarred for the rest of his life.
Whether Meryl’s mother screams, rebels, gives in, or shuts up, her guilt is never too loud for us to hear.
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