In shapeless, comfy clothes and floppy grey wig, Meryl Streep is barely recognisable in her latest film, The Laundromat. It's not a big role, but it is consistent with a career inclined towards the portrayal of independent women.
As a housewife, Ellen Martin, whose husband drowns in a boating accident, she comes to realise that she has been dudded by the life insurance company.
An unlikely late-life warrior with a bit of steel in her, she has the spirit to take her complaint to the source, direct to head office.
The Laundromat is based on the story of Mossack Fonseca, the company that was at the centre of the Panama Papers scandal that in 2016 exposed widespread use of offshore tax havens.
Ellen's story is one of three in this new Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's series, Traffic) film about how money laundering works and the impact it has. The screenplay is by Scott. Z Burns who wrote and directed The Report, about the endorsement of torture by the CIA post 9/11.
The Laundromat also relates a significant subject, and is put together by very talented people, including Gary Oldman as Mossack, Antonio Banderas as Fonseca, and Matthias Schoenaerts as a British businessman who Chinese clients get the better of.
It is watchable and has its moments though it is largely delivered as jaunty farce. The tone of crime caper tone sets the film at odds with itself.
Streep is good, of course. There's not a lot for her to do really, except to lend her stellar presence to a good cause.
It will be interesting to see her in the next new film from Soderbergh due out this year. It could be edgy. After five decades of work, after the reams of words written, after the accolades that garland her career, Streep seems, more and more, to be up for anything.
She first stood out in a small part in The Deer Hunter, a Michael Cimino film of 1978 that was one of the first to open up on the impact the Vietnam War on veterans back home.
Around the same time, she played a Holocaust survivor who had been forced into an unspeakable decision (Sophie's Choice), and then lent dignity to a young mother in a wrenching custody battle that touched on gender roles and parental rights (Kramer vs Kramer).
Opposite Jeremy Irons in The French Lieutenant's Woman, she was simultaneously tragic Victorian fallen woman and a liberated married actress having an affair.
By the time she took the role of nuclear power whistle blower and union activist in Mike Nichols' Silkwood of 1983, Streep had already made it, big.
Out of Africa with Robert Redford mid-decade was an extravagant big budget splash that she didn't need to make. Even though she is often best remembered today for that soap opera in the hills of Kenya, the early films that complemented her talents were the other, far better titles that had come out earlier.
Streep mastered Polish in Sophie's Choice and Danish in Out of Africa, but she doesn't always nail it. In the role of Lindy Chamberlain in Evil Angels, her Australian accent didn't work for me. Admittedly, Australian is a big ask, that many actors cannot manage, landing somewhere near Cockney English. Streep is in good company.
There was a period from the late 1990s to the early 2000s when she less visible, probably focused on her teenage children. There was a spectacular return afterwards, with Mamma Mia! and a performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that earned her a third Oscar.
Streep has been nominated for an Academy Award more often than any other actor. She has an outstanding 21 nominations. The two closest runners-up in nominations, Jack Nicholson and Katharine Hepburn, have a paltry 12 each. In her lifetime, Hepburn won four Oscars, but Streep, who has three, has just turned 70 and there is still time to at least equal the record.
The late Pauline Kael, film critic for the New Yorker, was a famous detractor. But she wasn't around to see Streep as an ageing rocker in Ricki and the Flash five years ago.
It was a cracker of a performance, and as Streep has observed, she can sing better than Madonna.
- The Laundromat is streaming on Netflix.
