CHAPTER 16 Meryl the Nun

I have doubts. I have such doubts!—Sister Aloysius

(Doubt, 2008)

After all the hullabaloo and fashion designers’ fears over participating, Meryl finally came face-to-face with her Devil Wears Prada alter ego, whom she could no longer avoid. In a power move, Anna Wintour, displaying good sportsmanship, actually showed up to the movie’s New York premiere on June 19, 2006, in a black-and-white Prada dress. Her arrival outshone the actors on the red carpet, giving media gossips their top headline of the night. Rather than run toward the exits when they were introduced, Meryl found Wintour to be “very, very cordial.”

The following day, Wintour’s spokesperson released this statement to the press: “She thought it was very entertaining. It was satire. What’s not to like?” The movie made her famous outside fashion and publishing circles. Though her persona was now entwined with Miranda, that turned out not to be a bad thing: Wintour got shit done, and nobody else could do what she did. After Prada, she was admired for her toughness. Later that year, Barbara Walters included Wintour among her ten most fascinating people of 2006, wherein the editor extolled the virtues of decisive leadership, conceding that “if Meryl seemed somewhat strong, I respect that.”

The love letter to fashion exceeded expectations, collecting $326 million at the global box office. It was the biggest commercial hit of Meryl’s storied career. And it surprised no one that Meryl owned the part, scoring Oscar nomination number fourteen. A lesser actor might turn Miranda into a shallow cartoon villain, but as the New York Times’ A. O. Scott marveled, “No longer simply the incarnation of evil, she is now a vision of aristocratic, purposeful, and surprisingly human grace.”

Meryl had done her job. Nobody else could do what she did. But she hadn’t expected men—men!—to identify with her corporate queen.

Meryl told NPR:

When I made The Devil Wears Prada, it was the first time in my life that a man came up and said, “I know how you felt. I have a job like that.” First time.… For men, the favorite character that I’ve ever played is Linda in The Deer Hunter, without question. The heterosexual men that I’ve spoken to over the years, they say, “That’s my favorite thing you’ve ever done.”

Or Sophie. And they were a particular kind of feminine, recessive personalities. No question that this person was not going to dominate the conversation at a dinner party. So they fell in love with her, but they didn’t feel the story through her body. It took [me until] The Devil Wears Prada to play someone tough, who had to make hard decisions, who was running an organization, [where] a certain type of man [would be able] to empathize and feel the story through her. That’s the first time anyone has ever said that they felt that way.

The movie would go on to infiltrate the culture in ways the cast and crew could not anticipate. It’s been referenced on TV, as when Steve Carell’s hapless Michael Scott imitates Miranda in The Office, and Kris Jenner dresses as the Runway chief in Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The zeitgeisty Prada captured a growing public fascination with the personalities behind luxury labels and the front row at Fashion Week. In 2006, Project Runway was a cultural phenomenon boasting its own catchphrases (“Make it work!”). The Swedish fast-fashion trend factory H&M had moved into American shopping centers, offering designer looks at discount prices. Wintour capitalized on her steely image to make the Met Gala the hottest runway in the world. And Meryl became an Internet meme, her brutal bons mots endlessly quoted online. Miranda remains her most popular role ever.

The Devil Wears Prada was a tough act to follow. Over the next two years, Meryl starred in an assortment of meh movies that her presence could not improve. She voiced a computer-animated insect queen in The Ant Bully, a box-office flop, and, in the low-budget drama Dark Matter, based on actual events, she apparently raided a Chico’s (no shame) to play a kindly bougie-bohemian philanthropist who tries to help a brilliant Chinese student adapt to an American university until he snaps and goes on a shooting spree. Meryl, nobody wants to see that! (And you hate guns!) Then, in 2007, she made an all-too-brief appearance as an older version of daughter Mamie Gummer in Evening, which marked the twenty-three-year-old’s debut as a leading lady. After graduating from Northwestern University with a theater degree, Mamie starred in the off-Broadway plays Mr. Marmalade and The Water’s Edge, earning awards for both. The plodding, overwrought Evening, directed by Lajos Koltai, wasted Mamie’s Streepian talents alongside those of Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha Richardson, Glenn Close, Claire Danes, and Toni Collette. Tanked by bad reviews, it lasted only a month in theaters. The poster, however, deserves to claim wall space in the Streep household forever. It features Mamie and Meryl’s names next to one another.

One year before Barack Obama’s historic, hope-fueled election victory, Meryl returned to overtly political cinema. The thriller Rendition was inspired by the true story of Khalid El-Masri, a German and Lebanese citizen whom the CIA wrongfully arrested and tortured. Jake Gyllenhaal played an intelligence agent with a moral compass, and Meryl a senior spy without one. Her accent: southern, slightly Reese Witherspoon.

Under the direction of Robert Redford, Lions for Lambs was an unusual, intellectually challenging war drama costarring Redford, Meryl, and Tom Cruise. As liberal TV journalist Janine Roth, Meryl dons black-frame glasses and a notepad to interview wild-eyed, charismatic Senator Jasper Irving (Cruise) about his idea for a new strategic operation in Afghanistan. He hopes it will unite the country and be a win for Republicans. Because Janine once wrote that Jasper was the future of the GOP, he thought she might give his plan positive coverage. She doesn’t take the bait, prompting Jasper to scold the news media as hypocrites complicit with the government in selling the war in Iraq.

Back in the office, Janine excitedly recaps the intense meeting to a male editor who tells her to “calm down” and write Jasper’s one-sided story even though she’s morally opposed to it. The blowhard reminds her that she’s fifty-seven years old, sniping, “What other network is gonna snag you up after this, OK?” Janine stands her ground. At least she can walk away with a clear conscience. To Meryl, Lions for Lambs was about “the difficulty of standing up and saying what you think.” She argued that “every movie is political. It’s political in what it doesn’t say, what it chooses to ignore.”

It turned out that moviegoers longed to escape from depressing reminders of an uncertain, post-9/11 world. They avoided Rendition and Lions, which together pulled in a dismal $25 million in North America.

Really, the only way to follow up back-to-back, ripped-from-the-headlines downers is to make a big-budget jukebox musical featuring ABBA’s bubblegum pop songbook. Naysayers snickered when Meryl agreed to headline Universal Pictures’ Mamma Mia!, an adaptation of the Broadway sensation being produced by Judy Craymer in tandem with Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, and ABBA songsmiths Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus. The studio tapped Phyllida Lloyd to direct. Craymer’s stage production had been packing theaters around the world since launching in London in 1999. It’s the ninth-longest-running show on the Great White Way, with more than $2 billion in worldwide ticket sales. Unlike the snobbiest of high-culture consumers, Meryl loved Mamma Mia! and wrote Craymer a letter to say so. She’d brought Louisa and six of her daughter’s friends to see it just after September 11. They wound up dancing in the aisles. The joy! The music! The love! Wasn’t that what life was all about?

Meryl’s note, said Craymer, is why she dared ask her to consider the part of Donna Sheridan, a single mom who runs a botique hotel on a picturesque Greek island. Meryl’s agent assumed she would pass. Are you kidding? She was like, Say yes!

“I couldn’t believe that they wanted me to do this part, and I was so thrilled,” Meryl recalled. “I kept asking, are you sure, are you sure?”

Amanda Seyfried signed on to play Donna’s bride-to-be daughter, Sophie, who wants her father to walk her down the aisle. The problem: she doesn’t know his identity. Sophie mails wedding invites to three of her mother’s former lovers, portrayed by Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård. Donna is horrified when all three handsome rakes show up for the big day, dredging up memories of her glory days as a freewheeling hippie. Brosnan can’t carry a tune, but he still makes her heart flutter. Meryl strapped on overalls, a staple of her Yale Drama School wardrobe, to dance and sing the hell out of the title song as well as “The Winner Takes It All” on location in Skopelos, Greece. In the exuberant finale, Donna, not Sophie, gets hitched. The groom: Brosnan, a fantasy come true for women living vicariously through Meryl, a beacon of hope that it is never too late to find your soul mate. Though it was ambitious and audacious, nothing about Mamma Mia! screamed cool to straight male movie critics who dominated big-league newspapers and magazines. Many were quick to write off a picture that wasn’t made with them in mind. “In press screenings, there are murmurs that to be singing karaoke [ABBA] songs in a relentlessly cheerful musical is a terrible career misstep,” relayed the Guardian. “After all, Streep is renowned for much more substantial roles.”

Rumors of Meryl’s death by ABBA were greatly exaggerated.

Opening in July 2008, two months before Meryl and Don celebrated thirty years of marriage, Mamma Mia! grossed a staggering $609 million worldwide. On a $52 million budget. “It’s so gratifying because it’s the audience that nobody really gives a shit about,” Meryl said. She told the Los Angeles Times, “Nobody wanted to make that. The smart guys banked on Hellboy to carry them throughout the year. The Mamma Mia! wagon is pulling all those movies that didn’t have any problem getting made.” As for the negative criticism, she could not care less. “I knew it would make lots of people happy… and when the bad reviews came out, the blogosphere just exploded with women empowered to say, ‘These people are crazy! What’s the matter with you? Life-hating, life-sucking, desiccated old farts.’”

Once again, Meryl was proving to patriarchal Tinseltown that making movies about women and for women was a bankable business. Declared Mike Nichols, “She broke the glass ceiling of an older woman being a big star—it has never, never happened before.”

She continued to immerse herself in new identities. On Christmas Day, Miramax released Doubt, costarring Meryl as an austere Catholic nun and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the progressive priest who she believes sexually abused an altar boy. John Patrick Shanley directed and adapted the gripping drama from his Pulitzer-winning play. Meryl’s character, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, is a parish school principal in a working-class Bronx neighborhood. She has a thick New York accent, a black-and-white worldview, and no sense of humor.

It’s 1964 and times are changing. She doesn’t know what to make of the liberal, gregarious Father Brendan Flynn, who’s new to St. Nicholas of Tolentine Catholic Church and has taken special interest in the school’s only African American student, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster). Her suspicions grow when the sweet, innocent Sister James (Amy Adams) reports that Father Flynn requested Donald meet him in the rectory; later, she notices that Donald is upset and smells alcohol on his breath. Flynn insists that Donald had been caught drinking church wine. Sister Aloysius smells a lie.

Producer Scott Rudin arranged for Shanley and Meryl to have lunch. When Shanley handed Meryl the script, she said, “I know you know this, but a film is different than a play.”

“Yeah, I know,” he replied. “Actually, one of the things that I’m thinking of doing is making the wind a character in the [film]—sort of the winds of something new, which could either be perceived to be disturbing or refreshing, depending on your point of view.”

“Oh, I love the wind!” said Meryl.

That’s when he knew she was going to star in the movie version. Meryl researched the role by talking to nuns, including Shanley’s first-grade teacher, Sister Peggy, who taught the Bronx-born playwright how to read. “Nuns are easy comedy, so we have made fun of them from Monty Python to Chris Durang, but I think there’s something that’s confounding to the outside world about women who reject all the things that most women build their entire lives around, which is getting a man, getting the husband and the children and looking good,” she said. “And they just jettison all of that, and there’s great liberation in that, I think.”

Shanley had considered Tom Cruise for Father Flynn, but cast the enigmatic Hoffman instead. Seven years earlier, Hoffman had starred with Meryl in Nichols’s Central Park revival of The Seagull, and he had since won an Academy Award for Capote. He specialized in playing weirdos on the margins of society and making them likeable despite their quirks. There was no better choice to convey Flynn’s ambiguous combination of charisma and creepiness. Is the fun priest actually a pedophile, or has buzzkill Sister Aloysius overreacted?

“Phil sort of viewed [Meryl] as a relative, and a somewhat tormenting relative,” says Shanley. “From his point of view, she would try to get in his head. So, they’d be offstage—I think it was The Seagull—and she’d be whispering stuff in his ear about his character that he didn’t want to hear. And he would have to sort of keep her out of his head.” Before filming a take in one of their dialogue-heavy Doubt showdowns, “she would be muttering ‘I’m going to kick your ass.’ And Phil is just ruefully smiling and shaking his head, muttering something along the lines of ‘Go ahead and try it.’ Then they’d go into the scene and they’d have this amazing ability to go up against each other and feed each other at the same time.”

Shanley told this anecdote at a panel discussion with Meryl and Hoffman in the run-up to the Oscars. Laughing, Meryl denied saying “I’m going to kick your ass,” to which Hoffman replied, “Oh, yes, you did.”

And Shanley will never forget what transpired during a scene in Sister Aloysius’s office. “Meryl was going off, and she gestured violently with her hand, and there was a lamp—a standing lamp—and she shattered it,” he recalls. “I was kind of amazed at how she didn’t seem to give a shit. She’s like ‘Yeah, I do that sometimes.’ It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, I broke the set.’ It was sort of like, ‘Eh, you’d better get another one.’”

There were times when Shanley witnessed Meryl struggling with doubts of her own. When Sister Aloysius dismisses “Frosty the Snowman” as heresy, Meryl didn’t seem to believe that her character would think that.

“Is she serious?” she asked Shanley.

“She’s dead serious,” he replied, to which he remembers her saying, “I’m not sure how to do this.”

On a day of reshoots, “I saw suddenly her vulnerability about the role, how deeply she cared, how worried she was that we got it,” Shanley told the LA Times. “She was like a young girl, very vulnerable and very shaky.”

Before their scenes, Meryl and Amy Adams would sit side by side on the set, knitting quietly and wearing all black. Around Meryl, Amy’s naturally ebullient mood became subdued. There’s a sequence in Doubt that shows the gender divide at St. Nicholas: while Father Flynn and members of the male clergy are having a raucous, boozy dinner, Sisters Aloysius and James eat in spartan silence with the women. Though Aloysius manages to force Flynn to quit his post, the church—predisposed to believe men over women—ignores her warning and transfers him to a bigger parish, thereby exposing more children to his inappropriate behavior. She has battled the patriarchy and lost. She seems to have lost faith in an institution to which she’s devoted her life, and it’s jarring to watch this confident woman break down. “I have doubts,” she confesses to Sister James through tears. “I have such doubts!”

Shanley wouldn’t tell me what happened in the rectory, but I have an idea. I believe the nuns.

For her next role, Meryl hung up Sister Aloysius’s bonnet and slipped on a chef’s jacket to enter the joyful consciousness of Julia Child, who found salvation in French cooking.

CHAPTER 16

Meryl the Nun

INTERMISSION