Ricki and the Flash, directed by Jonathan Demme.
Disproving the common contention
that older women rarely find starring roles in Hollywood these days, Meryl
Streep just keeps on acting. Perhaps
because she plays what might be called age-appropriate parts instead of attempting
some sort of faded ingénue, she maintains a busy and distinguished career. Whatever its merits, her latest movie, Ricki and the Flash, once again demonstrates both her versatility
and her commitment to her art; it also provides a kind of showcase for yet
another facet of her onscreen persona.
Streep plays the Ricki of the title,
a superannuated rock and roll guitarist who plays with her band, The Flash, in
a hole in the wall called The Salt Well, and works as a cashier in a place
called Total Foods, which should indicate exactly the level of both her
musicianship and her success. The Well’s
habitués, a scruffy lot, many of them beyond their first youth, apparently
adore Ricki and her group; her fellow guitarist, Greg (Rick Springfield) a
sensitive soul, also adores Ricki, who rejects him onstage, hurting his
feelings terribly.
Ricki interrupts her career in music and
at the supermarket to return to Indianapolis when her ex-husband Pete (Kevin
Kline) calls with the news that their daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer), despondent
over her husband leaving her, has attempted suicide. While Ricki (real name Linda) deserted her
family to follow her musical dreams, Pete cared for their three children,
remarried, and prospered; he now lives in a mansion in a gated community, where
Ricki seems as out of place as, well, an aged rocker in a motorcycle jacket, skintight
pants, tattoos, and yards of jewelry in an affluent, uptight bourgeois ghetto.
Most of the movie shows the tensions
between Ricki and her grown children, understandably estranged and resentful,
concentrating particularly on the fractured relationship between Ricki and
Julie. Some of its humor results from
the contrasts between the world Ricki embraces and the one she left behind, with
neither one emerging as an entirely positive dwelling place. The plot inevitably concludes at the wedding
of Ricki’s older son, an event fraught with tension until, despite all the
complicated problems and her own mistakes and bad decisions, Ricki manages a
most unlikely way to save the situation.
The movie primarily exists to
demonstrate once again Meryl Streep’s versatility and commitment to her art;
much of its surrounding hype concentrates on the fact that she learned to play
the electric guitar and sing in order to play Ricki. She apparently plays the few rudimentary
chords demanded and sings no worse than most of the contemporary screamers of
rock music, but she really shouldn’t quit her day job, either in Hollywood or
at Total Foods. Sadly, she also looks
quite silly and even embarrassing in her ridiculous hairdo and attire, exactly
like someone dressed up to impersonate a rock musician at a Halloween party. As embarrassing as her appearance, the
relationship with a younger man played by Rick Springfield, an actual major
rock star, never achieves either conviction or chemistry, and his doglike
devotion to her makes no sense at all.
One of the more interesting aspects of
Streep’s recent work reflects a willingness to play negative characters. The icy autocrat of The Devil Wears Prada, the alcoholic harridan of August: Osage County, and now the self-absorbed
musician of Ricki and the Flash
certainly demonstrate versatility and perhaps even a kind of artistic courage. The movie itself, directed by, of all people, Jonathan Demme, exhibits a kind of confusion about its subject: should we admire
Ricki’s choice of her art, such as it is, over something like normal life, or
condemn her abandonment of her children?
Its resolution suggests a far too easy and sentimental papering over of
that problem.
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