Review of Plenty

Meryl Streep plays Susan Traherne, a former resistance fighter/courier in World War II who struggles to find meaning in her life years after the war is over. She is unhappily married to a man (Charles Dance) who isn't ambitious enough for her, and he finds himself increasingly enraged by her self-destructive ways and interference in his professional life. Susan has a friend/roommate (played by Tracy Ullman) that she is close to, but who also has her own problems. She later has an affair with another man (played by Sting) in hopes of getting pregnant, but when that fails, finds herself thinking about her former one-time lover from the war (played by Sam Neil) whom she does eventually meet again, but it doesn't go the way she had hoped...

Well-acted and complex story about an equally complex yet emotionally unstable woman longing for the clarity and excitement of the War years but finds instead those hopes of "plenty" to be crushingly unrealized. Though not to everyone's taste to be sure, since some viewers will no doubt come to dislike Susan, and it does have an abrupt and unorthodox way of transitioning in time, I found myself intrigued by the narrative approach and well-drawn characters. Uneven and slow at times, but ultimately worthwhile despite the structural flaws.

Will no doubt resonate more with older and more mature viewers, especially if they misjudged it years earlier....