Where else do you find Streep actively working to fill in this character through her own brilliant choices? Such moments “dimensionalize” Linda and, at least in my own experience, command more audience investment than any other character in The Deer Hunter. When Linda smiles at Michael across the room at the chaotic wedding party, we watch not only her piqued interest in her boyfriend’s best friend but also witness Linda consider the gravity (and impossibility) of such a pursuit. In the film’s first act, Streep’s blend of relaxed charm and candid sensuality immediately disarms. She may not have respected or even liked Linda, but she certainly endows this tired archetype with unusual specificity, finding the sadness and sympathy for “all the girls in my high school” through a compilation of muted grit, emotional directness, and enthralling desires. If not this man, then another man: she waits for a man to make her life happen.” Linda waits for a man to come and take care of her. I want to break her out of her straitjacket, but of course I can’t even let that possibility show.” To prepare, Streep described how she “thought of all the girls in my high school who waited for things to happen to them. In an interview with The New York Times, Streep observed how Linda is “really far from my own instincts. JOHN: As Michael Schulman recounts in " Her Again ," a biography of Streep’s early career up to her first Oscar win, Streep openly expressed her reservations about this one-dimensional character. In this single moment and in her entire performance, Streep, still a relatively untested film actress at this point, gives bountiful detail and masterfully-calibrated dynamism to a woman who, by all accounts, she never really respected. Her face becomes a porous map of Linda’s inner emotional workings: relief and elation seem to rise up from the center and then part like two diverging waves until they ultimately encompass the trembling whole. “Oh, Michael” is such a simple exclamation, but the ways in which she utters it - first with breathless shock then again with crying and unrestrained affection - gorgeously endow it with all the profundity it needs. Honestly, just recalling Streep in this scene, in which De Niro’s Michael returns from Vietnam to an abandoned “Welcome Home” party at which only Linda remains, is enough to break my heart almost instantaneously. The words are “Oh, Michael.” And the face is, of course, Meryl’s. No, when I think about The Deer Hunter, all I can really think about are two words and a face. I don’t even think about the unabashed Guignol spectacle of those factually-dubious Russian Roulette scenes nor the barking malevolence of the film’s Vietnamese baddies, who remain troubling depictions that it would be irresponsible to call anything other than “racist.” I don’t think about Walken’s Oscar-winning performance, a feat of two deliberately clashing effects, in which the charismatic affability of the Pennsylvania prologue ultimately gives way to an indelibly terrifying display of dead-eyed emotional and mental vacancy. When I think about The Deer Hunter, I don’t think about the fraying everyman stoicism of De Niro in what is perhaps the most understated turn of his early heyday. MATTHEW: Probably, although that answer might be different on any given day. The Deer Hunter contains your favorite Meryl Moment, Matthew, right?. Linda is a supernatural creation of intense sincerity, relaxed yet energetic, guarded yet vulnerable, the film’s emotional core and its anxious heartbeat. Linda often provides the film’s only tender balm to such machismo, but Streep transforms her Girl Back Home into an uncommonly rich creation. The film carefully takes stock of its male relationships, tracing masculine bravado from the Pennsylvania mines to the roulette dens of Vietnam, both critical of masculinity and uncommonly poignant in uncovering the deep bonds that exist between men. Streep is given an underwritten part and asked to stand-in for ideas about femininity - and often simply femininity itself - in a picture dripping with testosterone. Meryl Streep is Linda, engaged to Nick (Christopher Walken) but in love with his best friend Michael (Robert De Niro). JOHN: The Deer Hunter is a mammoth film, both an epic tale of a soldier’s journey to hell and back (and back again), and an intimate communal study. #2 - Linda, a working-class girl waiting for the return of her fiancé (and her fiancé’s pal) from Vietnam. Hi, we’re John and Matt and, in case you missed it, we are watching every single feature film starring Meryl Streep.
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