Credit: Thematic illustration – Dover Street, London, 1955. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, Ben Brooksbank. Not a film still.
Susan Traherne begins Plenty (1985) as a young woman doing something brave and useful, and ends it as a woman who cannot find a peacetime life brave or useful enough. That arc is the whole, painful point of David Hare’s film, directed by Fred Schepisi, and Meryl Streep plays it with a fierce, unsparing honesty that makes the film uncomfortable to watch and hard to forget. Susan is not a likeable heroine in the conventional sense. She is brilliant, restless, funny, and increasingly difficult to live with, and Streep refuses to soften any of it.
The film opens in occupied France during the Second World War. Susan, working as a courier for the Resistance, carries a message across enemy lines and meets a young British agent, played by Charles Dance. Their night together is tender and brief, and it becomes the measure against which Susan will judge everything that follows. When the war ends, she returns to England expecting a life of similar intensity and purpose. Instead, she finds rationing, bureaucracy, marriage, diplomacy, and a series of jobs that feel like a betrayal of what she did in France. Hare’s title is ironic: post-war Britain has plenty of things, but not plenty of meaning, at least not for Susan.
Streep plays the young Susan with a lightness that is easy to miss. She is quick, witty, and physically alert. She moves through the French countryside as if danger were a kind of freedom. When she returns to London, that lightness hardens. Her voice becomes sharper. Her jokes become weapons. She marries a diplomat, played by Charles Dance in a later timeline as a different man, and then she unpicks the marriage with a series of scenes that are both funny and cruel. Streep does not ask the audience to approve of Susan’s behaviour. She asks them to understand the hunger behind it.
That hunger is the key to the performance. Susan does not want comfort. She wants significance. She wants a life in which her actions matter as much as they did when she was carrying messages through France. When ordinary life fails to provide that, she invents crises, picks fights, and clings to the memory of that one night as if it were a promise. Streep plays that clinging without sentimentality. In one scene, Susan recounts the wartime night to a friend as if it were yesterday, and you can see, in the way she holds herself, that she has told the story too many times. It has become both her identity and her prison.
The film moves through the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s in a series of episodes, and Streep ages Susan not with heavy makeup but with changes in posture, tempo, and tone. The young courier walks quickly and laughs easily. The middle-aged Susan walks as if she is always arriving late to a meeting she does not want to attend. Her accent stays English, but it becomes more clipped, more tired. It is a masterclass in how an actor can show time passing without announcing it.
Around her, a strong cast — including John Gielgud, Tracey Ullman, and Sting in an early acting role — plays the post-war world as a place of manners, evasions, and polite exhaustion. Susan crashes into that world like a guest who has stayed too long at a party and refuses to leave. Streep makes those crashes funny and then, a beat later, sad. A joke at a dinner party lands, everyone laughs, and then Susan says one thing too many, and the laughter stops. That extra sentence is where the performance lives.
Plenty was not a commercial success, and some critics found Hare’s play too talky for the screen. But Streep’s performance was widely praised, and it has grown in reputation because it tackles a subject that later films would return to again and again: what happens to women whose wartime competence is not wanted in peacetime? Susan is not a victim in a simple sense. She is complicit in her own unhappiness, and Streep lets her be complicit. That is what makes the film feel modern. It does not offer Susan as a symbol of feminism or as a cautionary tale. It offers her as a person who cannot reconcile the best night of her life with the rest of her life.
The final scenes, in which Susan is older, more isolated, and still holding on to the past, are played by Streep with a quiet that is more devastating than any outburst. She does not collapse. She does not apologise. She sits in a room and looks out, and you understand that the war, for her, never quite ended. It simply changed its form. The plenty of the title — food, houses, diplomats, parties — is all around her, and none of it reaches her.
For Past Tunes readers, Plenty is also a film about the sound of a generation growing older. The music of the war years, the songs that once meant danger and solidarity, become, in peacetime, the background music of dinner parties. Streep’s Susan hears that change and resents it. She wants the music to mean what it once meant. When it does not, she turns the volume up in her own life, with consequences for everyone around her.
Watch it for the transitions. Watch how Streep moves from a young woman running through France to a woman sitting still in London, and how the stillness becomes its own kind of running. Susan Traherne is not an easy signature role, and that is why it belongs on any serious list of Streep’s work. It shows an actor willing to play a woman who is right about the world and wrong about how to live in it, and to let the audience sit with that contradiction long after the film ends.
One more reason to revisit Plenty now is how clearly it shows Streep choosing difficulty over charm. She could have made Susan sympathetic by softening her edges, by letting the audience forgive her faster than her family does. Instead, she keeps Susan sharp, funny, and sometimes exhausting to be around, trusting that understanding does not require approval. That trust is what separates a star performance from a character performance, and it is why Susan Traherne still provokes argument decades later, in the best possible way.