Ironweed

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Nathan E. @Barkis44 May 1 A depressing colossal bore. See more john e @EggmanATL 11/13/2022 Ironweed is a bleak and unsettling emersion into the lonely, desperate existence of an alcoholic, homeless couple living on the streets of Albany in the years following the Great Depression. It features the second on-screen pairing of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, and it was released in 1987. Francis Phelan (Nicholson) is a former professional baseball player who is tortured by numerous events from his past. One of those events led him to abandon his wife and children over 20 years earlier. Since that time, he has simply wandered through life as a self-described bum. For a while, he found new love and housing with Helen Archer (Streep). Helen is a washed-up singer and musician who shares Phelan's love of the bottle, though she's reluctant to accept any blame for her current circumstance. Over the years, the two of them would sell off everything they owned in order to continue numbing their participation in life through alcohol. They now live day-to-day, sometimes together, sometimes apart. Both Nicholson and Streep give performances that are among the best of their careers (which would explain the Oscar nominations that both received for this film). The characters that they portray are people devoid of any self-respect, hope, or aspirations. This can make the film a difficult one to appreciate. The movie does not seek to provide excuses for the existence in which these characters currently find themselves, nor does it attempt to judge them. Director Hector Babenco simply unfolds the quite joyless reality that Francis and Helen trudge through, over and over again… as they remember days gone by, and have no reason to look forward to any days ahead. Streep is able to portray her character as one still having smarts, despite long ago abandoning socially accepted principles. She occasionally expresses brief glints of knowing things might be different… were it not for her lack of any strength to make it better. Her scene where she sings in a bar (both to a real and an imagined audience), and her scene praying in a church, are magnific. Nicholson is able to present Francis, flawed as he is, as a man who knows what a sense of honor is, even if he can't always maintain or achieve it. Two of his standout scenes anchor the tale's beginning (at the cemetery) and its conclusion (in the rental room with Streep). This isn't a film that attempts to provide a happy ending or a lesson to be learned. Rather, it unveils a few days in the lives of several people that most of us would rather not see… let alone devote a movie to. For that reason alone, I found this film extremely satisfying and worthy of more praise than was given to it by most critics. See more steve d @RT35616104 07/12/2020 It's too dark and melodramatic for me. See more 06/08/2020 Long ( two-and-a-half-hour running time) script that brings you into the world of homelessness and poverty during the great depression. Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep are brilliant (some critics say their talent was wasted here) but the direction and purpose of the movie escaped me. I went away thinking "but for the grace of God go I" but not sure of what I spent the time seeing. See more 06/06/2019 the acting was great with strange depressed story made for Nicolson and Streep another masterpiece. See more Fong Kok Hoong F @RT29722865 06/17/2017 Heartbreaking performances from Oscar nominees Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep as drunk derelicts who find evanescences of felicity in a relentlessly Cimmerian portraiture of vagrancy in Depression-striken Albany, New York City. See more Read all reviews

Ironweed

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