Good concept, poorly executed.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Meryl Streep plays Susan Traherne, a former resistance fighter in World War II who struggles to find meaning in her life decades after the war is over. She is unhappily married to a man(Charles Dance) who isn't ambitious enough for her, and he finds himself increasingly enraged by her self-destructive ways and interference in his professional life. Susan has a friend(played by Tracy Ullman) that she is close to, but who also has her own problems. Susan has an affair with another man(played by Sting), but finds herself thinking about her former lover from the war(played by Sam Neil) whom she does meet again, but it doesn't go the way she had hoped...Well-acted but incredibly dreary film has some beautifully directed (by Fred Shepisi) sequences, and Meryl is as attractive as ever, but her character wears out her welcome after a while, and relentlessly cynical film becomes tiresome.

I have known this movie now for 30 years. Almost no one I know saw it back in 1985. The one person who did see it didn't understand it, though he tried. His feelings were neutral, but his bewildered description intrigued me. He didn't get what I've got out of it all these years. I find it meaningful in different ways in each phase of my life, Now I see a strong message of the futility of trying to recapture the past, the intensity of the past, or one's youth. There is also a tacit reading of the film that the world grows less interesting over one's life, until one is left in a bland holding pattern. Each frame of the movie stands as a testimony to how much better things used to be, when you were young and feeling things intensely.The most generous thing you might feel about these character is confusion or ambivalence. You do not grow fond of them as the movie proceeds. Some of them are contemptible and/or dysfunctional. There is more to movies than liking the characters. This is a movie for thinking viewers, which were rare in 1985, and now all but gone.The movie is never jejune or coddling as later Streep movies are (Julia and Julia, The Devil wears Prada - weak filmmaking) and that's a testimony to capability of director Fred Schepisi, who seems to only film thoughtful scripts. Schepisi is a criminally underrated director. Schepisi also did good work on A Cry in the Dark, and really excellent work on The Devils Playground. As with all his movies this one is beautifully lensed, and the aspect ratio is very elegant.If anything is wrong with the movie it's that there's too much of the Charles Dance character (the bland, decent, diplomat husband) in it, especially in the last 45 minutes. He's not interesting, doesn't make a very good foil, and in some scenes seems to only exist as a device glue said scenes together.This is hard to track down, but is far better movie than Sophie's Choice, Silkwood, Out of Africa, where Streep played characters with more easily described dilemmas.

What must have seemed like a complex characterization is simply confusing in this Meryl Streep movie about an overly neurotic woman whose direction as a human being has no focus. She is Susan Traherne, who goes from Ally messenger in World War II to diplomat's wife in post-war England, all the while alienating practically everybody around her with the most bizarre behavior that seems to have no justification. Snippets of this woman's life are missing to properly flow from situation to situation, making the whole story a rather blurry mess. As Streep had risen to become the top dramatic actress in Hollywood, she was (and still is) mesmerizing. But it seems more like an acting exercises than an actual role to play, so it is no wonder that this film has seemed to have slipped into obscurity over her more known 80's films ("Sophie's Choice" and the same year's Best Picture, "Out of Africa").Only two of the supporting players (Tracy Ullman as an eccentric writer and Sir John Gielgud as Sir Leonard Darwin) really stand out, giving truly strong performances. Charles Dance, Sam Neill and Sting are the men in Streep's life, but they are easily swallowed up, both by the actresses' performance and the character's hunger to emotionally chew up and spit out each of her lovers. The film covers a lot of mid 20th Century history, from World War II to Queen Elizabeth's coronation (used as a backdrop for a sexual scene between a fully clothed Streep and Sting) and later the Suez Canal conflict. This is the type of film that might have better worked as a BBC or PBS mini-series to fully tie together the entire story to make Streep's character more understandable and sympathetic.

Plenty' is one of those films that is difficult to like, even though you may feel obliged to admire it. It represents an allegory of some kind or another, which is something that I read about in a newspaper review. Well, I must have read about it somewhere, because as I was watching it, I didn't understand what it was supposed to be about and needed some assistance when it was all over.The deadly weakness of this film is that Meryl Streep plays a woman that any sensible person in the audience would want to strangle, because she is so completely selfish and bloody-minded. By the end of the film she has become mentally unhinged and I would challenge anyone to feel any sympathy with her plight. It may have been a good career move for Streep to play, at least on paper, such a non-standard type of female character, but for those of us in the audience, it is a bit difficult to make the connection to her. She literally appears out of nowhere at the beginning of the film; she appears to have no family; despite being middle-class to the backbone and having a good job, she is disoriented, mentally unstable and continually whining about how boring life is. She marries a man from the diplomatic service and takes a downward slide towards either schizophrenia or psychosis, I'm not sure which. They move to another country and she remains unhappily sedated for the rest of the film, after attempting to have a relationship with a working class lad and it coming to a bad end, apparently a dilemma indicative, according to many reviewers, of the inability of the post-war Atlee government to organise a truce between the classes in England. Personally, I was not convinced.The supporting cast is actually quite impressive, but they seem to have little purpose other than to stroke Streep's colossal ego. Sam Neill plays her contemporary during the French Resistance; Charles Dance is her sympathetic and put-upon husband, Tracey Ullmann is her best friend (and I didn't envy her the task) and Sting is the working class lad she cons into sleeping with her.I don't mean to sound so smug but I was not convinced by a word of 'Plenty' and disliked the experience. Basically, it's far too cold and cerebral for a commercial venture that has been presumably made to attract an audience. The story, if it could be called that, is contrived, and what the film is meant to be about is obscure. Streep is insufferable in an impossible role and I found the entire thing nasty, unconvincing and totally lacking in any entertainment value whatsoever.