David Thomson

. . . . [Regarding Postcards from the Edge,] Streep is not easily small, abject, or a discard . . . . Indeed, given the assignment, she may magnify failure until it becomes magnificent and operatic--for example, Ironweed . . . She has such problems now with seeming natural.

. . . . Ironweed might have worked on stage--on film it felt dead and studied.

[In the entry on Hector Babenco, Thomson wrote, "[G]iven William Kennedy's Ironweed, he went for exactly the wrong starry cast and blurred the implacable firmness in Kennedy's book."]

David Thomson
A Biographical Dictionary of Film,
Third Edition (1994),
pp. 722-723, p. 36