Plenty (Widescreen)

Yet screenwriter David Hare, adapting his successful stage play, asks us to accept and identify with Traherne, a steadfast individualist whose striving and scheming cost her everything, including, finally, her sanity.

Much of the attraction -- not to mention the challenge -- of "Plenty" lies in trying to rationalize Traherne and her motives and motivations. When first seen, she is a young woman who has arrived in France to aid the Resistance movement. Although only 19 years old, she is in a position of power and a situation fraught with danger, and she loves it. After the war, she returns to England, full of high ideals about building a better world where everyone can flourish. But what she finds in her homeland instead is a nation of men and women who are far more concerned with getting back to normal, and satiating themselves in material goods after years of wartime shortages.

For Susan, the postwar world of plenty is distressingly devoid of thrills, goals and open minds. Her feelings of emptiness lead her to seek out bohemian and beatnik friends, a foxy lower-class lover and a husband whose career in the diplomatic services is on the rise. But flirting with danger and accumulating wealth are not the answer for Susan either, and she languishes in luxury.

The role of Susan is custom-made for Streep and she turns in yet another tour de force. Classy and vivacious one moment, scathing and bitter the next, Susan is genuinely a puzzlement, and certainly an addictive one. You may not like her, but you will not forget her.

There is no shortage of fascinating characters in the supporting cast either, nor of fine actors to play them. Singer-comedian Tracey Ullman is enchanting as Alice Parke, Susan's roommate and confidante. Alice wears men's clothes, smokes marijuana and aspires to be a writer and artist, but little things like bad pot keep getting in her way: "How am I supposed to find artistic inspiration if I can't even get any good drugs?" she complains. Sting, who too often relies on his looks to carry his performances, turns in his best screen work to date as Mick, a black-marketeer whom Susan hires to get her pregnant (the love scenes between Sting and Streep are both funny and sexy). But finally, Susan dismisses him after 18 months of trying. "There comes a point at which the experiment should be stopped in the name of common courtesy," she notes.

As Susan's weary husband, Charles Dance brings life to what could easily have been a one-dimensional part, effectively conveying the toll a marriage built on pity can take on a man. Sir John Gielgud also sparkles as the duty-minded Leonard Darwin, whose run-in with the defiant Susan at a dinner party is the nastiest and most uproarious scene in the film.

"Plenty" is not an easy movie to categorize, and interpretations of its central character and its message are sure to be numerous. But there is no denying its power or the allure of the people in it. There are lighter, more charming films around, but there are few as ultimately rewarding.

In the excellent director's interview that comes with this version of the DVD (but not the other, less expensive one, so be sure to fork out the extra bucks and get this issue) Fred Schepisi explains that this is a film about memory. What he modestly doesn't say is he conveys the theme of memory superbly well through his expert direction, with music and lighting and set cues that make us feel as though we are living life with Susan, and that, oddly, we have lived it along with her before. We feel her nostalgia for France when she does. We feel her claustrophobia in her suburban London existence. Plenty is a film of rich textures, one we can almost smell and taste as we watch it.

Its themes are rich and multi-faceted. Plenty is about idealism and disillusionment, about hypocracy and naivete, about promises never fulfilled, or that may be unfulfillable. The heroic "good" war, the post-war rise of diplomacy to replace confrontation, the hypocracy of suburban middle-class morality, the belief that the good guys can do anything, so long as they do it in a civil manner, these are just some of the themes of Plenty. And watching it, I was somehow reminded strongly of our present times in many ways. We (Americans) are in a rampant consumer culture, drenched in middle-class morality as we rationalize everything from war with Iraq to plundering oil for our SUVs. We feel we can get away with questionable actions of foreign policy if we go about it diplomatically, because we're "the good guys." (John Gielgud's speech to Charles Dance as he explains his disenchantment over Suez, where he says he would have gone along with whatever the government cooked up so long as they would have been honest to him about it, keeps ringing in my ears.) Most of us don't stop to examine our lives, and the fact that at one point Susan goes into advertising ("I don't expect it to stretch me, but maybe it'll be good fun.") made me howl. The film also deals with class distinctions and rising through the social classes beautifully. Susan goes from working girl to upwardly mobile woman to diplomat's wealthy wife. Her best pal Alice does all this as well, basically following on Susan's coattails in the beginning, but although she starts out rather immature she eventually grows beyond Susan, though she probably would not realize that herself. It's odd that in a novel, movie or play the secondary character grows beyond the hero(ine), but that is just one twist that makes this work fascinating.

It all happens rather subtly. There is no pontificating, no "morals," no dissolves and title cards that say things like "Eight years later." No one explains the changes that happen to these characters slowly, over two decades, and they do not seem to notice many of them themselves. Schepisi counts on the viewer to figure it all out. Maybe that's one reason the film has never done well, whether in the theaters, on the critics' lists, or on home video. Another is it's not a very "American" movie. Aside from the fact that it deals with Europe and its culture and history, of which most Americans are woefully ignorant, it does not have a single hero or heroine, a single point of view, and a feel-good ending, three essential ingredients for almost any American movie (at least of the last 25 years). As I often find myself saying when it comes to movies I truly love, I'm amazed this got made at all.

Streep plays the role of Susan very well (of course), but with perhaps just a bit more restaint and calculation than I would have liked. We never really see a slow build, an evolution, of her Susan, but instead flashes of sanity as she battles to live in a too-sedate and plastic world. More impressive are the other characters. Charles Dance is sympathetic (the only somewhat sympathetic character in the movie) as Susan's long-suffering husband Raymond, someone in love with her and yet destinted to never understand her. Tracey Ullman impressively holds her own in every scene with Streep as best friend Alice. And the eclectic casting of the supporting characters--John Gielgud, Ian McKellen, Sam Neill, Sting (!) and Burt Kwok (Kato in the Inspector Clouseau movies, who here has what may be the best line, "These 'Gyps need whipping!")--works brilliantly. Schepisi deserves credit for not turning this into a "mere" Masterpiece Theater costume drama, which could have easily happened if he'd just plundered the cast of BBC dramas for his actors.

Fred Schepisi is one of our more underrated directors. (I say "ours," even though he's from Australia.) And this may be his greatest film. I urge anyone who's curious, though, to watch it several times before making a judgment. As one of the reviewers below said, the film's greatness doesn't hit you the first time. If you give it time, though, it will eventually sweep you away. I just wish some of those critics would give it a few more spins in their DVD players, so that they'd *really* be impressed. (I guess for the record I should mention picture quality, sound, etc., all sharp, crisp, clear, blah blah blah. Widescreen 16x9 format, enhanced for supersized TVs, and all that.)