She-Devil: A Review

 

SHE-DEVIL

This review is part of the Summer Under the Stars Blogathon. Today's star is Meryl Streep.

Meryl Streep is held as the Gold Standard of Actresses working today, having earned a record-shattering 21 Academy Award nominations and three wins throughout her career. She-Devil was not one of those nominations or wins. A financial and critical disaster upon release, it is now time to look on She-Devil and see if it is the fiasco that is perceived as or if it is a misunderstood feature. 

Frumpy housewife Ruth Patchett (Roseanne Barr) endures her two kids and the genial disinterest of her accountant husband Bob (Ed Begley, Jr.). Bob has a wandering eye, but so far has never technically wandered. That is until he meets Mary Fisher (Meryl Streep), a Danielle Steele/Dame Barbara Cartland-type romance novelist whose novels Ruth devours like the donuts she keeps by her nightstand. Mary immediately becomes besotted by Bob and the two begin an immediate and passionate affair.

Ruth is first distraught at the liaison. However, when Bob berates Ruth at a dinner that she slaved over for Bob's parents and calls her a "she-devil", she snaps and decides that it is time for revenge. Bob lists his four assets: Home, Family, Career and Freedom, and his one liability: Ruth, whom he was forced to marry in a shotgun wedding. While Bob and Mary soon cavort at the cost of everyone else, Ruth opts to methodically destroy each one of Bob's assets. 

That requires her to among other things destroy her home, dump her two kids at Mary Fisher's lavish estate and adopt a new persona: nurse Vesta Rose. This last one is to rope in Mary's disapproving and gauche mother (Sylvia Miles) while managing to land an ally in Nurse Hooper (Linda Hunt). More of Ruth's machinations go towards bringing down Bob, who has gone back to his old ways with women. Will Mary survive the myriads of miseries and scandals that those around her are inflicting on her delicate sensibilities?  Will Ruth enact her wicked revenge on the both of them? 

Perhaps it is not surprising that She-Devil never gets mentioned when cataloging the great moments in the filmography of one Meryl Streep. Streep, like someone she is often compared to, is exceptionally skilled when it comes to drama. Like Katharine Hepburn, however, Meryl Streep has to be firmly guided whenever performing comedy. In She-Devil, director Susan Seidelman is not that firm hand. 

My sense is that Streep, again like Katharine Hepburn, was too intelligent for the material. By that I mean Streep decided that she had to go fully broad to make this adaptation of Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil either remotely believable or a whacked-out satire. This is a deliberately mannered performance, full of breathy speaking and exaggerated body movements. I sensed that Streep was determined to make this a comedy by forcing it almost through sheer will. It ends up coming across as almost desperate, forced and fake. Oftentimes, I wondered if Mary Fisher was meant to be campy and over-the-top. 

When, for example, Mary is burying her pet dog, it is unclear by Seidelman's directing and Streep's performance whether we are meant to feel sad for Mary or laugh at how seriously, almost cartoonishly, she is behaving. Mary apparently is supposed to be so stupid that when told that her mother would benefit from receiving a little TLC, she asks if that is a new drug. Streep struggles, if not pretty much refuses, to take comedy seriously, expecting her broad manner to tell us that this is a comedy. By the time she goes into a rage at the various humiliations Bob's kids and her own mother have put her through, it becomes impossible to accept that Mary is a person. She has been a cartoon for so long that the audience cannot see even a plausible person here.

Worse, Seidelman and her writing team of Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns can't fully figure out if She-Devil is an actual comedy or a drama. It should be a comedy. However, that message did not appear to fully register with Roseanne Barr. She plays this mostly straight, like it was a full-formed drama about a woman scorned unleashing hell on her philandering husband and his mistress. Rarely does Barr appear to behave as if She-Devil was a comedy. Sometimes she comes close to making it a comedy, such as when her house explodes behind her in a shockingly awful backscreen effect that even late 1980's audiences would have rolled their eyes at.

However, for the most part Barr plays this as a straightforward revenge drama. She also loses a giant mole that was her right side. I am not sure, but I think she managed to shave it off. I do not remember if there was any mention on how such an obvious physical feature disappeared so quickly.

In a strange way, I think She-Devil would have worked better if it had opted to be a straightforward drama. Ruth is a surprisingly positive figure: one who rebuilt her life and empowered women in similar situations by creating an employment agency for the unloved and unwanted. Granted, this was part of her overall scheme to destroy Bob, but I wondered why she would continue her efforts at revenge when she had done well for herself, and he would fall if left to his own devices. 

Ruth's relationship with Nurse Hooper seemed similarly strange. It starts out antagonist for no reason, then shifts to BFF mode again for no reason. The closest reason that I can find is because the plot required it to. Begley, Jr. seems an odd choice to be the object of desire among so many women, but there it is. He was acceptable as the sleazy Bob but veered between Streep's broadness and Barr's more dramatic manner. 

A Martinez is this vaguely gay pool boy (or man), a little bit mincing while attempting to convince us that he was Mary's jilted gigolo butler. Miles is having a ball as the vulgar Mrs. Fisher, revealing Mary's actual age of 41 versus the 35 she insists on. Mrs. Fisher also tells a nosy reporter that Mary got knocked up at 16 and gave up her son for adoption. This plot point is mentioned but never brought up again. That seems a strange choice. One actress, Rosanna Carter as Judge Brown, not only read her lines robotically but her appearance made me genuinely wonder if she had suffered a stroke. 

Howard Shore of all people wrote the She-Devil score. It did fit into the vaguely sitcom-like manner of this faux-farce. It just did not make it any better. 

Upon accepting the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Cecil B. DeMille Award, Meryl Streep made a most curious acceptance speech. She proclaimed that without her and her fellow actors Dev Patel, Amy Adams and Natalie Portman, poor Americans would be stuck watching nothing but football and mixed martial arts, helpfully adding that MMA was not "the arts". Putting aside how for some Americans, continuous showings of football and mixed martial arts would be nirvana, there was something vaguely Mary Fisher-like to her grand ideas about her presumed place in our lives. The pomposity, the grandiosity of Streep's worldview made Mary Fisher look downright downhome. Unlike Mary Fisher, Meryl Streep did not opt to use a breathy voice to deliver her lofty pronouncements of and to the great unwashed. 

No matter how snobbish Meryl Streep gets, those of us mocked by her Golden Globes speech will always have She-Devil to remember her by. And as a final side note, I attended a Kansas City Royals game and an Audra McDonald concert on the same day, so THERE!

She-Devil is neither farce nor drama. It is almost schizophrenic in its storytelling. Not funny enough to be a true comedy, but not serious enough to be drama, She-Devil is a misfire of minor proportions.  

DECISION: C-