Streep and Cruise--In Like Lions, Out Like...?

In the wake of Rendition's less than impressive opening tally last weekend --number 9 with $4.2 million in box office in a fairly anemic field--Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's United Artists studio start-up is surely looking carefully at how they position their political drama, Lions For Lambs, for its November 9 release date.

It says something that the always crowd-accessible Cruise was even more so, spending over two hours pressing the flesh and doing media chats (print interviews: zero) before last night's London premiere.

One would have thought the accumulated star power in Rendition--Jake Gyllenhaal as the muddled CI.A. agent, Reese Witherspoon as the pregnant wife of an Egyptian-born businessman who's snatched by a government squad, and Meryl Streep as the U.S. director of intelligence, with a wickedly cornpone accent--might have added up to more ticket buyers than that the film's take last weekend.

A Wall Street Journal analysis split the blame between a surfeit of intelligent Oscar-style pictures and a general misery fatigue in the audience:

A glut of serious-minded Oscar contenders is crowding theaters with disastrous box-office results. The latest, most pronounced casualty, "Things We Lost in the Fire," a Paramount/Dreamworks project loaded with Academy Award honorees, combusted in its initial 1,142-theater rollout, earning just $1.6 million. The film was predicted to make twice that amount...

But a marketplace filled with similar pictures is the most likely cause of the film's crash. Also opening wide over the weekend, New Line's political drama "Rendition" -- starring Oscar favorites Meryl Streep and Reese Witherspoon -- similarly bombed, with a weak $4.2 million in 2,250 theaters, while Focus Features' hit-and-run melodrama "Reservation Road" collected a feeble $36,821 from 14 theaters.

The piece also laid some blame on the mixed reviews both Rendition and Reservation Road earned. That hints that and on a crowded track of prestige pictures, Lions--even with the presence such certifiable stars as Streep, Cruise and Robert Redford (who also directed)--will need the robust touting of respected critics to gain traction.

A predictably friendly, early review came from the lefty web site Counterpunch, where Prairie Miller praised the film for "unfolding as nearly a raw, gritty, highly stylized rough cut of itself...a breathlessly urgent and stinging reality-based dramatic indictment of recent US foreign policy and its endless war on terror."

On the other hand, the London Times, despite featuring it in the London Film Festival for which they're the key sponsor, said, "You can't fault the anger, but the drama glows as brightly as a five-watt bulb. . .the film is effectively a theatre piece. The surprise, and disappointment, is how little effort Redford makes to mould the three central debates into a credible drama."

Streep saw Evening come out to a $12 million domestic gross this summer and appears in playwright John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman, next year . The sometime opera student, also in 2008's much poppier Mamma Mia! ("I'll be singing, not lip-synching"), told the Times that Lions isn't strictly anti-war, but maintains a "Mona Lisa smile" on the issues.

Still, the Times piece continues,

Streep expects "a big reaction" to the film. "I have no doubt. We're bracing for it." So does she want Bush out and Hillary in the White House? Another pause. "I'm glad that there seems to be change. People are holding their breath. That's why you don't see masses on the streets - they know he's [Bush] going. I'll be relieved when the whole group is out. I think in a way things had to get this bad before they got better. It would be nice to have a woman president. I think half the Senate should be women, half of Parliament, half the ruling mullahs. But that will never happen, darling!" She laughs merrily.

With her character Janine Roth as a journalist trying to get the story but up against Cruise's careerist, avidly hawkish Senator Irving, she embodies the contradictions that long kept the now-unpopular war safe from truly probing media criticism:

Streep says she "had a lot of people in mind" when creating her character. "I'm a news junkie - C-Span, BBC, CNN." Journalists, she believes, "circled" the whole story "and came to it late. You can't be the servant of two masters." She admires correspondents such as CNN's Baghdad bureau chief Michael Ware and wishes she was "Christiane Amanpour [CNN], but I'm just not cut out for it".

Her parts tend to be complex: Joanna Kramer in Kramer vs. Kramer(for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1979) and Sophie in Sophie's Choice (Best Actress, 1982); or her title role as The French Lieutenant's Woman. She is the most nominated actor in Oscars history.
These characters, she says, "are in you before you begin. It's like motherhood. I think you're always the mother you're going to become even when you're a little girl. You have it in you already understood - all the mistakes you're going to make, all the things you'll do right."

One daughter, Mamie, played Streep's younger self in Evening, and though Streep jokes that she urged her to become a molecular biologist rather than act, she is proud of Mamie's debut.

(Meryl Streep with her daughters at the New York premiere of The Devil Wears Prada; hoto by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)