Star Power: Influence of Actors

Star Power: Influence of Actors & Directors

As an actress, Meryl Streep has chosen not only complex characters to portray, but she has also chosen films with very real and complex social issues at their centers. With such a diverse range of characters she has personified, Streep has a very significant place in not only American pop culture and society -- but worldwide as well. The ubiquitous nature of the media in the last forty to fifty years has given people the ability to become acquainted with stars such as Streep in a very particular way. Streep is viewed in an entirely different way than Marilyn Monroe was in her time for example, because the audience has changed in modern times. Streep's roles in such films like "Kramer vs. Kramer," "A Cry in the Dark," and "The Bridges of Madison County" are just a few of her best roles and this paper will address the central issues in the aforementioned films and relate them to Streep's role in our culture over the past 40 years.

Robert Benton's adaptation of "Kramer vs. Kramer" is concerned with the contemporary problems of divorce and single parent nurturance, and tells the story of how a rejected husband learns how to be a caring father. Streep is Joanna Kramer, whose performance can be viewed as a test case for the feminist analysis of family (Malloy 1981). "Kramer vs. Kramer" shows a reorganization of the family unit, but the this reorganization is not linked with any of the issues regarding the typical male and female roles in the family -- that is, the film maintains rather than questions the structure of the institution of marriage. "The film reaches an ambiguous position in relation to the family that allows the audience to occupy any and all positions in relation to the subject matter of the film" (1981).

Rogert Ebert noted in his review of the film in 1979, that "Kramer vs. Kramer" is so intriguing because there is never the necessity to choose sides, although the film is unconventional for that time in that it was a woman leaving her husband and child as opposed to the man. The film shows a struggle between two unhappy individuals who are striving to find themselves -- Ted struggles in his career, and Joanna feels that she lost herself upon entering into the marriage. While this film belongs more to Hoffman than Streep, what is the most interesting in terms of social and cultural ideas is that Streep's argument at the end of the custody trial is a very simple "appeal-to -- the fact that motherhood is powerfully persuasive as a social institution" (Malloy 1981).