Stanley Kauffmann

“A film-world joke every January 1: "Another New Year! I wonder what accent Meryl Streep will give us this year." [?] As a Streep devotee, I like the joke because, in a narrow way, it underlines one of her distinctive aims: transformation. Many a good actor has ranged wide without remarkable vocal or physical transformation--Jane Fonda, for instance; but for Streep, vocal and physical changes are both incentives and aids in her intent to explore herself. Her performances in, say, Sophie's Choice and Silkwood and The French Lieutenant's Woman are the idea in flower. They are not just extensions of the costumer's and cosmetician's craft: they are Streep's connections between her being and some beings that overlap hers.

In most of her films, those noted above and Plenty and Out of Africa and Ironweed, transformation was only the beginning of her work, in many aspects accomplished before the shooting began. But oocasionally, as in Still of the Night, the process didn't go much further because of the role's limits. That is the trouble with A Cry in the Dark. . . .

In the screenplay by Rober Caswell and Fred Schepisi, derived form a book by John Bryson, Lindy is a straitened role. After the bereavement and her subsequent surprise at the accusation of murder, she becomes fairly consistently arrogant, tough, contemptuous of the public and the legal process that has indicted and imprisoned her. To put it practically, as a part for an actress, it's corseted. It's faithful to the original, I guess, but the price is that, once past the pain of the baby's loss, very little about Lindy is moving. Most of the conferences and inquiries, even many of the scenes in which lindy and her husband buck each other up, are not especially interesting. The writers have not solved a tough problem: how to remain accurate without being artistically immobilized. They haven't penetrated the role to provide more than what Lindy Chamberlain actually said and did. What's missing is not invention or distortion but insight. All that Streep can do is give us a skillful facsimile of the actual, generally rather remote woman.

Her accent "this year" is, of course, Australian--so accurate that it's sometimes dense. Wearing a dark wig bound close to her head, she does nothing inauthentic, but her whole performance seems a series of screen tests for the real role--the complex and demanding role--to come. For Streep, this part is a particular misfortune. If there is a gap in her gifts, it's that she lacks immediate, effortless warmth. She is perfectly (and I mean perfectly) capable of summoning whatever emotional currents a role requires, but she is not, as many a lesser actor is, an innately warm and engaging personality. By ill chance the role of Lindy, as written, underscores this lack in Streep and keeps her performance cool--an accomplished peice of work we can watch with admiration but with little empathy.

Sam Neill, as the husband, has a better role. . . .

. . . . Ian Bakker's lighting is very successful with Streep's face, which is not easy to light: here it's a piece of high-cheeked sculpture in a dark helmet.

I've read that some Australian film people were upset because an American was brought in to play Lindy. It's easy to understand that resentment, even without asking whether there's an Australian equivalent of Streep. But the knife twists even further. If we didn't know that Lindy was being played by someone not Australian ("Listen to her!" we keep thinking. "Sho sounds just like the real Australians all around her"), A Cry in the Dark would lose much of whatever effect it does have. It would be just an adequate Australian account of a murder case with not very great intrinsic interest. In fact, the most striking aspect of the film, other than Streep's transformation, is extrinsic, that it was completed before the outcome was known.

Stanley Kauffmann
New Republic, December 5, 1988