An excuse for Meryl Streep to do an Australian accent, and it goes without saying that she does it uncommonly well, better, that is, than the common Australian. "Oy thank it's toyme we statted air holly-dyes," etc., etc. Of course there is also a story around all this, a true one, concerned with the wife of a Seventh-Day Adventist minister who sees her baby daughter ("bye-bee dawda") snatched by a dingo from their camping tent and who is accused and convicted of killing the child herself. How to make so flagrant a miscarriage of justice dramatically or morally interesting is a pretty steep challenge. Certainly the case provides occasion for some well-warranted media-bashing ("Hands up, all those who think she's guilty," urges an Aussie Phil Donahue to his studio audience) as well as cop-bashing and gossip-bashing. But this isn't enough, quite. These are barn-broad and well-riddled targets, and there is something complacent and small-minded about drawing beads on bullet holes. Streep herself has enough of the instincts of an artist not to want to settle for spotless martyrdom, and though the movie skirts her off-putting religiosity (heaping that onus on her husband alone) and makes no special point, beyond the mute set decoration, of her middle-class commonness (the Garfield toy, the framed kitsch on her walls), she runs a gamut of not always attractive moods, with a particular proneness to an alienatingly sharp tongue. But of course that -- the tongue -- brings us back to her dialect ("Ha' beauty-full! Luke at the flarrs!") and reminds us that, besides an artist, she is also a technician. With Streep, even in the morally murkier waters of, say, SOPHIE'S CHOICE, the artist tends to get the short end of the stick, the technician the long. With Sam Neill; directed by Fred Schepisi. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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