The movies of Nancy Meyers
Prompted by the appearance on Netflix last week of her 2015 film The Intern, as well as an episode of my favourite movie podcast devoted to her work, I have been rediscovering the work of one of the most successful female writer and directors of all time: Nancy Meyers.
Known in-part for her impeccable taste in set-design (all her films, whether twenty or two years old look straight out of an Instagram explore tab), Meyers has been making feature films for over thirty years. Her stories tend to centre women, usually professional and high-powered (and always white), making her something of an outlier among Hollywood’s usually male-centric ecosystem.
Meyers certainly suffers from a form of sexism that sees her work relegated to ‘feel-good’ or ‘lifestyle’ categories. As such, and in part because of the relatively low-stakes of her stories – usually our protagonist is dealing with some kind of workplace crisis or romantic inconvenience – many don’t tend to take her work seriously. Yet, such themes are, if not universal of course, but relatable for millions of not only women, but men alike.
My favourite of her films by far is 2008’s It’s Complicated, starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin. Depicting, again – unusually for Hollywood – the love and emotional lives of middle-aged protagonists, the film is as watchable as anything you’ll ever see. Meryl runs a bakery in Santa Monica California, something which has somehow earned her prodigious wealth, alternating her time between garden parties overlooking the crystal blue Pacific and her almost palatial country estate, only just begging to feel ‘fully human’, almost ten years after divorcing the perennial lady’s man played by Baldwin.
Like all her work, it is ‘aspirational’ in the sense of depicting a level of wealth, comfort and aesthetic beauty unattainable to almost all of us, but in that sense, it is perfect escapism. In 2015’s The Intern, Anne Hathaway’s character runs an ‘e-commerce fashion start-up’ (cue eye-roll) that has grown exponential, benefiting from a second wave dot com boom and her own unique talents for tailoring the shopping experience to ‘women everywhere’. What Hathaway’s character lacks in realism or relatability, her co-star Robert DeNiro’s makes up for in spades.
Likewise, the depiction of Meryl’s emotional turmoil is actually quite affecting, and I imagine even more so for people closer in age to her character, experiencing similar uncertainties and anxieties as they enter their senior years. It is Meyers’ depiction of middle-aged, usually very wealthy and at times neurotic (and always white) characters that is most entertaining and fully realised.
No matter what you make the morals or complexities of her work, Meyers certainly knows how to do something that very few filmmakers can match – create a sense of warmth. That makes a rewatch of any of her films about as enjoyable as it can get.