’’Love is like peeing in your pants on a cold, dark, rainy night-You’re feeling warm, but no one else has a clue.’’
Want a clue ? Falling in Love- A 1980s movie about love and not much else. Enlarge the movie poster of Streep and De Niro (on the left of this review ) until you can see their faces well and you see ...what? An expression of complete self-sufficient oblivious happiness that is such a good summary of the movie.
Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep outdo each other as the couple who find love a little late in the day, by then they’re married to other people. Mid-life or late-life romances are less common even in Hollywood, often becoming a comic footnote to the ’real’ romance of a younger couple. And its harder to make the plot work. When you’re young and free, you can find romance everywhere, even on a shipwreck like Titanic. Add ten or twenty years, and the romance is the shipwreck of their life.
Love in Hollywood usually goes with The Plot. Sparks, twists, and death or danger, challenges, high drama, heroics, histrionics. What then, if there is none of these? Will it lose its power? She’s a housewife, and he’s a builder, both satisfactorily married. They meet by chance a number of times, in the trains to New York. It doesn’t matter how it ends, really, that’s nowhere near the point. The actors have to deal with externalizing an inner experience - to show what is going on in their heads somehow, often with no dialogue.
So De Niro pushes anxiously through the commuters, looking for Streep on his way to work. Streep waits patiently for him to show up at the New York station long after her usual train has left. Both look transformed by happiness when they do meet, and I’m bad at trying to describe mood and emotion. So, any other actors would have simply flopped or made you cringe. De Niro is so different, understated but stirring. Meryl Streep as usual disappears into character completely, save few occasions where too much thinking lessens the emotional effect. After Streep takes over a character, however, it is quite impossible to visualize any other actress doing that role. A remarkable portrayal of instant ’’connection’’. It is in the way the relationship progresses-neither has to work very hard, they fall easily into it. No self-doubt, no heavy handed scenes of guilt and regret.
The movie is beautifully undercast-just as it should be for a movie about about the inner world of two people. No other major characters, or backdrop events, or side plots. Gives it the feel of a personal fantasy. Most scenes such as the crowded shots of Grand Central Station, the Metro-North trains, or New York streets during Christmas, help to heighten it by the contrast of their impersonality.
While the acting is so honest, the script goes in for a heavy dose of cliches. Contrived coincidences by which they keep running into each other in New York. Stormy nights and lovers’ separations. The inevitable supportive friends. The Big Apple’s cliched spots - Macys, 5th Avenue, the Rizzoli bookshop where they meet. And some irritating bits to show how its all predestined. Especially, a quirky scene in the beginning where DeNiro and Streep have not met yet. They are talking to different people at opposite call phones at the train station, but the dialogue is created to make it sound like they could be talking to each other. There is a lot of running to catch trains, missing trains, waiting for trains and so on- a metaphor for love?
The one line that made me laugh - on their first lunch date, Streep asks De Niro what he would like to know about her, he says ’’How much do you weigh?’’