Pre-Order Plenty (1985) (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

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[JPCinema]

Great film that changed my life.

 

[lark144]

Great film that changed my life.

Did you see Kate Nelligan in the play on Broadway? I thought she brought a sense of passion and spontaneity, as well as despair underneath, creating a real empathy and human understanding. Still, the film was terrific, and has certainly improved with time, turning into a minor classic. I watched it again recently. I own the Network Blu. The stage version was so overpowering and so direct, the film paled by comparison at the time for me, as without Nelligan, it's seems more elliptical. I'm not sure if someone younger, coming to the film cold, without having lived through or being intimately connected to the events depicted would be able to understand what it's actually about. Still, it's extraordinarily beautiful, in a kind of twilight fashion, the way the waning light of day has this great burst of blinding energy before fading. It might be one of Meryl's best non-comic performances, her ambiguity matching the film's visual style.

 

[bujaki]

Did you see Kate Nelligan in the play on Broadway? I thought she brought a sense of passion and spontaneity, as well as despair underneath, creating a real empathy and human understanding. Still, the film was terrific, and has certainly improved with time, turning into a minor classic. I watched it again recently. I own the Network Blu. The stage version was so overpowering and so direct, the film paled by comparison at the time for me, as without Nelligan, it's seems more elliptical. I'm not sure if someone younger, coming to the film cold, without having lived through or being intimately connected to the events depicted would be able to understand what it's actually about. Still, it's extraordinarily beautiful, in a kind of twilight fashion, the way the waning light of day has this great burst of blinding energy before fading. It might be one of Meryl's best non-comic performances, her ambiguity matching the film's visual style.

Count me in as having seen the play with Kate Nelligan. One reason why I didn't admire the film as much as it probably deserved to be.

 

[lark144]

Count me in as having seen the play with Kate Nelligan. One reason why I didn't admire the film as much as it probably deserved to be.

It works much better now, and is equally heatbreaking at the end, though Streep is a very different kind of actress from Nelligan. The way Streep performs it, emotion is so buried, it's difficult at times to understand what she's going through, what her lament and attempts to break away are all about. I assume this was the director's intention, as the way the play was directed on Broadway was very different. The film, and Streep's performance, is like a series of Chinese boxes, or peeling an onion. Upon reflection, that character, for all her apparent "liberation" is a kind of updated version of the "Woman in the Attic" from Jane Eyre. I still wish they had cast Nelligan instead. Yet it remains my favorite film of Streep's. There are moments when she's utterly extraordinary. For all the script's political analysis, it's really a neo-Sirkian meleodrama, similar in many ways to Far From Heaven. The Blu from Network is breath-takingly gorgeous, and I imagine this will have the same master.

 

[JPCinema]

When the seminal and most significant moments occur early onthere will never anything can equal those moments.