Credit: Thematic illustration – crowd inside Grand Central Terminal, December 1953. Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Not a film still.
Molly Gilmore does not arrive in Falling in Love (1984) with a grand entrance. She arrives the way most people arrive in each other’s lives: by accident, on a train, at Christmas, in a city full of strangers. Meryl Streep plays her as a married woman, a mother, and a graphic artist who is content enough with her life to be surprised by her own unhappiness. That surprise is the whole film. Directed by Ulu Grosbard, Falling in Love pairs Streep with Robert De Niro for the first time since The Deer Hunter, and it asks a quiet, unfashionable question: what happens when two decent people, both married to other people, fall in love anyway?
The film is often remembered, if it is remembered at all, as a disappointment. Audiences in 1984 expected De Niro and Streep to ignite the screen, and instead they got a restrained, melancholy romance about commuters. That restraint is now the film’s greatest strength. Streep does not play Molly as a woman looking for an escape. She plays her as a woman who has built a good life — a husband, a son, a job she likes — and who discovers, almost against her will, that a good life can still leave a room empty.
Molly meets Frank Raftis, played by De Niro, when they both reach for a book in a shop and then keep meeting on the train into Manhattan. Their conversations are ordinary in the best sense. They talk about work, about their children, about Christmas shopping, about the small irritations of married life. Streep makes those conversations feel like courtship without ever making them feel like a performance. She listens to Frank the way people listen when they are truly interested, not the way actors listen while waiting for their line. A smile arrives a beat late. A laugh is cut short by a glance at her wedding ring. The film trusts the audience to notice those beats, and Streep trusts the film enough not to underline them.
What is striking about the performance is its domestic detail. Molly is not a fantasy figure. She makes breakfast, she argues gently with her husband, she worries about her son, she works late on a design and comes home tired. Streep plays tiredness well — not as exhaustion for effect, but as the specific tiredness of a woman who has been holding a lot of things together. When she is with Frank, she is not suddenly younger or freer. She is lighter, and the lightness is a little frightening to her. You can see her enjoy it and then check herself, as if enjoyment itself were a betrayal.
De Niro matches her restraint. Frank is an engineer, a family man, a man who is not used to talking about his feelings. The two of them together create a romance that is built on recognition rather than passion. They recognise in each other a similar loneliness: not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of being known only in part by the people closest to you. Streep’s gift in these scenes is that she never makes Molly seem cruel for feeling that way, nor does she make her seem noble for resisting it. She makes her seem human, which is harder.
The middle of the film follows the affair as it deepens without ever becoming sensational. There are no villains. Molly’s husband is kind. Frank’s wife is kind. The film refuses to give the audience an easy reason to root for the affair or to condemn it. Instead, it shows the cost of it in small, accumulating ways: a lie about a late train, a Christmas present bought with guilty care, a phone call that goes unanswered. Streep plays guilt not as melodrama but as distraction. Molly forgets things. She starts sentences she does not finish. She is present in her home and absent from it at the same time.
That quality is what separates Falling in Love from the glossy romances of the 1980s. The film is set at Christmas, and New York is filmed with a soft, wintry beauty — shop windows, snow, commuter crowds — but the beauty never quite warms the characters. Streep walks through those streets with her coat pulled tight, and you understand that the city is both romantic and indifferent. It will give two strangers a train carriage and a bookshop, and it will also send them home to their separate lives.
The final act, in which Molly and Frank decide whether to leave their marriages, is played with unusual honesty. Streep does not let Molly become a heroine of romantic destiny. She lets her be afraid. She thinks about her son. She thinks about what a new life would actually look like on a Tuesday morning, not just on a snowy evening. When she makes her choice, it feels less like a plot twist and more like a woman weighing two kinds of love: the love she has promised and the love she has discovered. The film does not punish her for either, and Streep does not ask for sympathy for either.
Critics at the time were divided, and the box office was modest, but the performance has aged well because it anticipates the kind of adult romance that later films would treat with more fanfare. Streep was, in the mid-1980s, at the height of her reputation for accents and transformations. Here she does something quieter and, in its way, braver: she plays a contemporary American woman with no accent to hide behind, no historical costume to wear, and no great speech to deliver. The transformation is internal, and it is visible only if you watch closely.
For Past Tunes readers, Falling in Love also captures a particular sound of the era. The mid-1980s commuter romance belongs to a world of train announcements, department-store music, and quiet apartments after the children are asleep. There is no hit song to carry the emotion. The emotion has to be carried by two faces in a crowded carriage, and Streep carries her share with a minimum of fuss.
Watch it for the train scenes. Watch how Molly looks out of the window when Frank is talking, how she laughs at a joke she has heard before, and how she says goodbye as if she is practising for a longer goodbye. Those are not the moments that win awards, but they are the moments that make a performance last. Molly Gilmore is not one of Streep’s most famous roles, and that is part of its charm. She is a reminder that a signature role does not have to be a historical figure or a woman in extremis. Sometimes it is simply a woman on a train, realising that her heart has moved before her life has caught up.