Hal Hinson

By contrast, in "The Naked and the Bred", an article on acting in the October 2, 1984 issue of the Boston Phoenix, Hal Hinson wrote that “…. Streep doesn't use her technique to release her emotions but as a substitute for them … [S]he tries to think her characters into existence. As a result, the insides of her characters are parched and dry; they're skinny-souled.” Though he probably arrived at his conclusions independently, Hinson's article contains many of the same ideas you could get from reading Pauline Kael on Streep.. I've therefore left quite a bit of it out, but the following paragraph has some good lines: “…. Streep is a classical actor in the purist sense. The reality she discovers in a performance isn't a personal reality. Her characterizations don't spring from her own experience, from her own personality. They are built to express a more universal, objective truth. Streep's personality on the screen is scaled to carry the big themes and the big literary characters are safe in her hands, because her style is measured and clean. The director can rest assured that her performance won't be unbalanced by personal eccentricities…. [In Sophie's Choice,], Streep carries the movie's heroine onto the screen with her margins intact.” Hinson also notes that in moments in Sophie's Choice, Streep is more vivid physically than he usually finds her to be on screen.