Justice is a plodding and uninteresting revenge thriller starring Nicolas Cage and January Jones, and as I don’t have much else to say about it I’m going to fill the rest of the space by telling you about my dinner with Meryl Streep, who stars as Margaret Thatcher in the forthcoming The Iron Lady. This is all true, mad as it seems. And as I outstayed my welcome, as I always do — you can rely on it — I even caught Ms Streep washing up. ‘Meryl Streep washing up!’ I exclaimed. ‘Next, it’ll be Tom Cruise putting the bins out.’ She smiled graciously as she rinsed out a mug. God, she’s lovely.
I was invited, along with several other women journalists, to a private screening of the film and then an ‘informal supper’ at the Islington home of Phyllida Lloyd, the director of The Iron Lady who also directed Meryl in Mamma Mia! and put her in dungarees, just to show she may not need a man even though, in the end, she did. I don’t know why I was on the guest list, although I suspect, as sometimes happens, I may have been confused with the Guardian columnist Deborah Orr, who is more important and cleverer and a far better writer, although, for future reference, I am prettier and also know a card trick that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. (I can also make an origami swan, which may be a boast too far, but there you have it.)
Meryl is waiting for us at the front door when we arrive, wearing a print shirt and black trousers. She looks beautiful, and is beautiful — astonishing, nearly translucent skin— but has the kind of fascinating beauty that allows her to travel from plain (Ironweed) through to radiantly glamorous (Manhattan, Heartburn, The Devil Wears Prada). She greets everyone with ‘lovely to see you’ and ‘thank you for coming’ and I think, in my excitement, I may have kissed her on the cheek. She looks like the sort of woman who would smell nice and now I can confirm it: she does. She smells all clean and florally. (In the taxi from the film to the house, I sat next to Polly Toynbee, who also smells nice, by the way. I didn’t sniff her as such, but I’d have known if she smelled bad.)
The dinner was chicken curry followed by a Julia Child, all-American apple pie made by Meryl with her very own hands, the ones that scrabbled at the land when she had that farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills. Suzanne Moore (Guardian/Mail on Sunday) later complained that she could have gone the extra mile and also made custard, but that is Suzanne for you. I’ve known her for many years and custard is all she thinks about some days. The pie was excellent, and I ate such a huge portion I thought I would burst my Spanx. Abi Morgan, who wrote The Iron Lady screenplay — as well as, most recently, The Hour for the BBC — was also there and described the film as not so much a bio-pic as an exploration of ‘losing power and grief’, which it is.
I’ll review the film nearer its January release date — you’ll just have to be patient, my dears — but I can tell you this: Meryl is amazing, magnificent, awesome, flawless. She has not just transformed herself physically to play the role, but also plunges into the character in such a way that she loses her own self. It’s not acting. It’s alchemy. It wasn’t a note-taking evening but I recall Meryl saying she wanted to do a film ‘about the end of a life’ that ‘circles issues of mortality’ and, although never a fan of Thatcher or her policies, she had always admired her conviction and the strength it must have taken to break through.
I think she also said that, no, 3D was never a consideration, she was also fed up with Hollywood’s obsession with the teenage-boy market, and she would like to go see Gerhard Richter at the Tate but thought she would be mobbed. What else? Oh, yes, she attended one première of Mamma Mia! along with the Empress of Japan who, mid-way through, leaned over and, behind a hand, tittered, ‘Naughty!’ I leave her doing that washing up, although not before giving it to her straight. ‘I can’t be expected to drop everything every time you are in town,’ I tell her; ‘I’m a busy person.’
So that was my dinner with Meryl Streep, our greatest living actress, which wasn’t that interesting — I can now see I should have drunk less and remembered more — but is and will always be more interesting than the dreary Justice. Next week, I sincerely hope to see Tom putting the bins out or, if not, at least Angelina doing some light dusting.
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