Joe's View

Cruising along at the top of her profession for 30 years now, Meryl Streep stands apart from all of the other great movie actresses.

How is she different?

Streep has never been interested in establishing herself offscreen as a larger-than-life figure in the tradition of Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn; she has never patented a screen “personality” and then done endless variations on it; she has never been the object of vicious public gossip or tabloid scandal; and she maintained her position as a star for the first 20 years without ever being a major box-office draw.

The real kick of Streep’s current position in Hollywood is that finally — at the age of 60 — she is viewed as a potent commercial force as well as the superb actress she has always been.

Friday’s opening of “Julie & Julia” (above) is expected to be the star’s third big summer box-office hit in a row — following last year’s “Mamma Mia!” and “The Devil Wears Prada” in 2005.

By regularly mixing heavier fare in Oscar season (such as last year’s “Doubt”) with summer froth, Streep has assumed a dual position as critics’ darling and audience favorite that is unique for an actress her age.

By the time Davis was 60, she was reduced to B-horror movies — as was her peer Joan Crawford.

Hepburn maintained her star position into her 70s — she was 74 when she won a fourth Oscar for “On Golden Pond” (1981) — but Hepburn went through long periods when she was semi-retired.

Streep has averaged more than a film a year since she made her debut in the juicy small role of Lillian Hellman’s bitchy friend in “Julia” in 1977.

Unlike Davis and Crawford, Streep has made time to return to the theater on a regular basis, most recently for a spectacular performance in the title role of “Mother Courage” in Central Park (right) three years ago. The actress also has been married to the same man — sculptor Don Gummer — for more than 30 years and found the time to raise four children.

It’s no wonder Hollywood has never known quite what to make of this extraordinarily talented and independent woman. She became and remains a star on her own terms, with a prodigious career based almost entirely on sheer talent.

Catherine Deneuve gives a memorably intense performance as a grieving mother in “Apres Lui (After Him),” the 2007 French drama that arrives on DVD next Tuesday via IFC Films.

Best known for playing rather cool and enigmatic characters, the star pulls out all of the emotional stops in Gael Morel’s story of a woman who forms an inexplicable bond with the young man other people blame for the death of her son in a car accident.

“Apres Lui” is about the craziness that can infect survivors in the aftermath of a sudden death. It shares a lot of common ground with the Joan Didion memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” in which the writer tried to describe her own disorientation in the months after her husband had a fatal heart attack while they were having a quiet dinner in their Manhattan apartment.

Camille’s family and friends ostracize Franck (Thomas Dumerchez) because he was at the wheel of the car in the accident that killed Mathieu (Adrien Jolivet). Franck and Mathieu were best friends, but no one except Camille appears to care about what Franck might be going through.

When the young man doesn’t show up at the funeral, Camille goes to him and then begins to shift her maternal affection to Franck.

Deneuve goes through an extraordinary emotional journey in the course of the film, holding nothing back in the scenes showing Camille’s reaction to the loss of a beloved son, but then changing gears in a very subtle manner as the woman decides to transfer some of her love for Mathieu to his best friend.

Without Deneuve’s star power — and more than 50 years of experience as a screen actress — the behavior of Camille in the second half of “Apres Lui” might put us in the same camp as the woman’s angry family. Deneuve forces us to share the grieving mother’s “magical thinking,” however, and the result is a great performance.

Movies and television have become so mashed together that when you see a lousy formula film in a theater now, you can’t use that old putdown — “it’s like TV.”

With the older audience more or less vanished from the multiplexes, “movies” have become increasingly infantile and “TV” is better than ever. Most nights it’s hard for me to justify going out to see something like “The Ugly Truth” at a multiplex when I have season two of the charming HBO series “The Flight of the Conchords” waiting for me at home on DVD.

The new Judd Apatow movie, “Funny People” (above), about comedians in Hollywood, reminded me of a bad TV show — HBO’s ‘Entourage’ which follows a boorish quartet of young guys on the way up in Hollywood. 

Movies and TV about show biz used to be a small sub-genre — even in the cases of some great insider films, the public simply wasn’t interested (i.e. “Sweet Smell of Success” which was a box-office disaster in 1957 and then very slowly began to acquire a cult following).

Now, we’re drowning in junk that assumes we care deeply about the feelings and anxieties of actors, comics, directors, etc. Half of the so-called reality shows on TV seem to be about models or has-been actors and musicians.

These contemporary Hollywood stories almost always avoid the most interesting aspects of the movie and TV colonies — the really odd sexual alliances; the aging moguls who believe they won’t die (and keep trading in their wives for newer models); the vile behavior of the serfs after they become powerful enough to employ their own serfs (it’s college fraternity pledging raised to even more obscene levels).

Moviemakers used to try to relate to the concerns of middle and lower middle class audiences and to deal with important social issues (look back to such best picture Oscar winners of the 1940s as “The Best Years of Our Lives” or “Gentleman’s Agreement” and you’ll see what I mean).

Now, the folks in Los Angeles assume the country is filled with…well, there is a word for it that I don’t want to use here. Eleven letters, starting and ending with “s.”