Ricki and the Flash (2015)

Film: Ricki and the Flash (2015)
Stars: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Mamie Gummer, Audra McDonald, Sebastian Stan, Rick Springfield
Director: Jonathan Demme
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Seeing Meryl Streep onscreen, regardless of what she's playing or what the film is, always sends a jolt down my spine.  Miranda Priestley, Karen Silkwood, Joanna Kramer-too many great performances through the years have led me to a point where I watch the film and cannot help but be thrilled.  When I found out that she would be playing a fading rocker in a film from Jonathan Demme (arguably the best director she's worked with since 2006, when she had a supporting role in a Robert Altman film), though, I was thrilled-I loved the idea of Meryl getting a little bit out of her comfort zone of light-and-frothy and flaringly dramatic, perhaps finding a new angle we hadn't yet explored.  Indeed, her Ricki is an addition to a string of impressive performances from the actress, though the film itself never seems to make the time to really impress us the way that Streep does.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Ricki, formerly Linda (Streep), a woman with a small-town rock band that plays at the same bar every single night, rocking out to hits both classic, and pandering to the younger crowd, more recent (if you've ever wanted to listen to Meryl Streep jam Lady Gaga and P!nk, you've come to the right place).  She gets a call from her ex-husband Pete (Kline) telling her that their daughter Julie (Gummer) is in trouble and getting divorced, and that she needs to fly home to come to her aid.  Once she gets there, she realizes that her children hate her, that her daughter is suicidal, and that she was wholly replaced maternally in her quest to find stardom by their stepmother Maureen (McDonald).

The performances in the film were better than the Diablo Cody script, I must say.  I usually like Cody's plays on suburbia, and there are moments of that like when Ricki returns for her son's wedding, or the garishness of her look when she isn't in the club (the Total Paycheck joke clearly meant to parody the Whole Paycheck, and really everything involving the disparity in income between she and those around her was incredibly apt).  However, Cody's script doesn't really leave any room for us to care about anyone other than Ricki.  Her children are written as carictures of real people: we get the messed-up one, the perfect one, and the gay one.  All three eventually forgive their mother, but we never get a sense as to why Julie, who easily forgives her, was mad to begin with considering how quickly she dismisses her mother's absence, or why her gay son is willing to jump on the band wagon after a mildly racist encounter with his boyfriend (I feel it odd that Ben Platt's clearly gay bartender character wasn't referenced once in her making up with her gay son-this feels like something that was left on the editing room floor).

Really no one gets a fleshed-out character except for Ricki, as even Rick Springfield is more of a tattooed manic pixie dream guy than anything else-we rarely get to see what drives him personally.  Kevin Kline and Audra McDonald at least make the best of their big moments, with Kline clearly harboring feelings for Ricki even though he knows she's wrong for him (that sort of "first love" pining we all get from time-to-time), and McDonald nails her moment with Ricki, trying to find a politeness for a woman that she clearly has despised for all of these years.  McDonald's Maureen is perhaps the only character that seems like a realistic reaction to Ricki-having loathed her for so many years, but struggling to find a sense of manners for the woman that gave her her three children. Maureen realizes that she'll always be "the mother," but also that there should be a place for Ricki if she wants it.  It's the most complete character arc in the film.

This is because, despite a very well-realized performance from Streep, Ricki herself is a contradiction I don't think the script quite thinks through.  She's clearly someone Cody wants to paint as a hypocrite, a hardcore conservative who abandoned her family for fame-on-the-road.  And yet she desperately likes Ricki, trying to use feminism as an excuse late in the game of how, if Ricki were a man she would be forgiven, but let's be honest-it's less that she wasn't forgiven because she was a woman, but more because she took a risk that didn't pay off; that's the true difference between she and Mick Jagger.  If she'd gotten a major career, there would have been more forgiveness involved.  The script makes it so that you're supposed to hate Ricki just a little bit, and the reality is that, as Rick Springfield memorably says in a speech, "it's not your kids' job to love you, it's your job to love them."  The fact that the ending proves that Ricki needed them to love her without that selflessness makes the film poorer and shows the weakness in the direction/writing, though Streep plays this character with gusto and knows her inner turmoils (you see it in the way she doesn't really care that her kids don't love her until they actually say it out loud).  It's a case of the performance being far better than the movie.

Which is why I didn't love Ricki and the Flash, but I'm glad I went.  Streep getting inside a character like this hasn't happened since August Osage, and she hasn't been this risky in a while.  Still, I do think that Cody either needs to pick sharpness or sentiment with her writing, as she can't seem to get both down at once.