IRONWEED

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 ably portrays 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 magnificent. Nicholson deftly presents 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).

Ironweed 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.