CATAPULTING HERSELF into the role of paranoid-schizophrenic idealist Susan Brock, Meryl Streep electrifies the screen in Fred Schepisi's otherwise disappointing Plenty. Adapted from the London stage play by David Hare, Plenty chronicles the disillusionment of a young English woman, played by Streep, who cannot come to grips with an imperfect world after actively serving in the French Resistance during World War II. Haunted by the fear that mankind has failed to "grow up" after the Holocaust, Susan sets out on a masochistic mission of self-destruction, punishing herself as a representative member of an unfeeling generation that needs remediation in lessons of the past.

Although Hare's psychological drama would have sat better with the '70s generation of "lost souls" out to find themselves, his premise of an idealist lost in the anti pastoral post-war haze of reconstruction is nonetheless an interesting one. It suffers, however, from Schepisi's overly artful direction and pacing. In an attempt to recreate the vanguard, new wave look of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, cinematographer Ian Baker arbitrarily splices the film every twenty minutes or so in order to mark the passage of time, eschewing the more conventional and smoother dissolving methods. The problem, of course, is that Baker isn't Welles and his product is nothing more than a pretentious, inferior copy of the real thing.

Schepisi's inexperience as a director complicates his handling of Streep's character, Susan Brock. Because she is so complex and passes through so many psychological metamorphoses, the audience needs some assistance in interpreting her within a single context. Schepisi's direction provides us with no help whatsoever, developing each individual sequence in a creative vacuum wholly severed from the rest of the film.

The fact that Streep and co-stars Sting and Tracey Ullman are able to break through the film's hard crust of mediocrity is a tribute to their collective talent and bravura. Brilliantly manipulating a spectrum of emotions from pastoral innocence to manic depression to pulsating sexuality, Streep may very well clinch the third Oscar of her career as the little--lost--activist. Once again, her most appealing characteristic is her chameleon-like control of facial expression. In one of the film's most fleeting but poignant moments (and probably the only one in which Baker's off-the-wall pacing has any effect), Schepisi moves directly from a shot of a glamourous Susan in her artsy Soho 'walk-up to one of her staring out of the window in a mental ward after the first of many nervous breakdowns. Scrubbed of all make-up and eroded with rivers of tears, Streep's pinched expression carries more punch in this one scene than Hare's screenplay does in the entire film.

Running a close second to Streep in talent are rock singers Tracey Ullman and Sting, proving that the movie musical is by no means the only avenue open to today's talented musical celebrities. As Susan's unlikely bohemian sidekick Alice, Ullman provides the film with some strongly needed comic relief. Her entrance on screen is a treasure; waltzing into the office decked out in a man's pinstriped suit, she silences her employer's huffy outburst at her appearance, by remarking "Imagine what my boyfriend's boss is saying right now." Hare balances Alice's bohemianism with Susan's purified idealism--as Susan becomes progressively disconnected, Alice straightens herself out, eventually becoming one of Susan's few emotional supports. Sting's cameo as a London prole whom Susan selects to father her a child out of wedlock is well worth the price of admission. With his mean, hungry good locks, the King of Rock fits right in against the gray backround of urban grime and poverty, swaggering through the streets with all the rights of ownership.

In short, despite some fine performances by Streep, Ullman and Sting, Plenty is the fall season's most bitter disappointment. Had Schepisi and Hare been willing to sacrifice the artsy elements in favour of a more straightforward, biographical format, Plenty would have been more than enough.