Meryl Streep has previously sung on screen (most recently for Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion), but the upcoming Mamma Mia! is the first real musical of her 30 year career. Why all the singing and dancing, and why now? “It was to prove Pauline Kael wrong,” insists Stuart Jeffries.
In this Guardian interview, he suggests to Streep that her decision to take a lead role in this likely summer blockbuster was nothing but a long-delayed strike against the film critic who decades earlier complained that Streep acted only “from the neck up.” Amazingly, Streep essentially shrugs and says, “Yeah, maybe”––and then goes on to tie Kael’s criticism of the actresses body language to the film critic’s ethnic/economic insecurity. The actual, speculative diss after the jump.
Kael’s bile hurt Streep. “It killed me,” she once said. But at least, I suggest, by taking this role in Mamma Mia! you are, in a very literal, high-kicking way, proving Kael wrong. Few 59-year-old screen actors seem as lively from the neck down as she does as Donna.
“I’m incapable of not thinking about what Pauline wrote,” Streep replies seriously. “And you know what I think? That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl who was at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena Wasps with long blonde hair, and the heartlessness of them got her. And then, years later, she sees me.”
Of course, there’s a long tradition of film critics taking out their own ethnic and economic anxieties on poor, beautiful, defenseless actresses, and Kael was particularly vindictive against blondes. Except when she was praising Michelle Pfeiffer and calling Mariel Hemingway “a goddess.” But the rest of the time, yeah, pretty much everything she came up with came from being a poor, bitter Jew. Thank god an Abba musical came along so that Streep could finally fight back!
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