Meryl Streep may have gone back to her usual lane, but the fervor around her movies was not nearly as significant as it was in the late 1970s and ’80s. No one could deny her performances, but no one was fully embracing the films either. Then 2002 happened. One the one hand, she starred in “The Hours,” the Best Picture-nominated drama that won Nicole Kidman her Oscar. Out of the three leads of the film, which also included Julianne Moore, Streep was the one who didn’t get nominated, but that is because she was busy getting nominated for the Charlie Kaufman-penned, Spike Jonze-directed meta-comedy “Adaptation.“
Streep’s first foray into comedy was met with much resistance. But here, she was in a prestigious, high-minded comedy. The shackles of her being synonymous with a certain kind of movie were not nearly as tight because “Adaptation” was a film that could bridge that gap. She could play a goofy scene like her being incredibly high as she talks on the phone to Chris Cooper’s character, and people could connect to the comedy of it without being confused as to why Meryl Streep was the one doing this.
She carried this momentum over to a little picture called “The Devil Wears Prada.” This was a 57 year-old woman headlining a major studio film, giving a bombastic comedic performance that also mixes in a good amount of pathos, and the picture made over $100 million at the box office, which hadn’t happened in her career before as a first-billed actor. Nearly 20 years after she thought her career might be over because of her age, Streep managed to become one of our most reliable movie stars.
