La scelta di Sophie

I don't know why I didn't want to see Sophie's Choice, not for years. I knew about Meryl Streep's performance, Alan J Pakula. Kevin Kline and I also knew that I had to see it eventually. Well, Christmas 2017 brought the shattering story into my life and now forever in my subconscious. Extraordinary is the first word that comes to mind. Meryl Streep's performance is out of this world. Every detail in her creation is a sort of link to her heart and therefore to mine. "Emil Dickens?" Her eyes, asking the question to the awful librarian will stay with me forever. Meryl Streep as Sophie asked that question 35 years ago. Amazing! What a devastating treat. It will make me go back to see all of her films., specially "A Cry In The Dark", "Plenty", "The Bridges Of Madison County" "Julia and Julia" even "Death Becomes Her" and "The Devil Wears Prada" Thank you Meryl Streep, thank you very much.

Comments from 2008 Viewing: Pakula skillfully brings the Styron novel about a woman's harrowing journey through WW2 to the screen. Streep's performance comes across as too mannered initially but must be considered a success ultimately, worthy of the Oscar she received. Although his character is supposed to be moody and manic, Kline is still much too animated and somewhat annoying as Streep's lover. MacNicol is fine, bringing much needed normalcy into the story as the young man befriended by the couple. The scene depicting the title of the movie is perhaps the most heart-wrenching in all of cinema. Hamlisch's elegiac score helps create a haunting atmosphere.

Comments from 2013 Viewing: The scenes in Brooklyn, which take up much of the film, are repetitious and somewhat dreary. The flashback scenes are disjointed and lacking in narrative flow. Pakula's direction seems heavy-handed and too respectful of the book. Rating reduced from 8 to 7.

If the Oscars were to take every Best Actress winner ever -- from Janet Gaynor to Helen Hunt -- Meryl Streep would definitely have a good shot at winning against them. She gives a spellbinding, totally believable performance as Sophie, a timid Polish woman who befriends Stingo (Peter MacNicol), while she tells him of her tortured past in a concentration camp. As always, she does her foreign accent without fault, and puts her all in her performance, better than she's ever done. The movie itself is very good, too -- it may drag at times (at 2 1/2 hours), but definitely worth a look.

After enjoying Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline in the recent ensemble comedy "A Prairie Home Companion," it was great to see their dramatic performances in "Sophie's Choice," the movie that made them famous. Here, they play Sophie and Nathan, a volatile young couple living in a Brooklyn boardinghouse in the summer of 1947. Their story, and eventually the story of the Polish Sophie's time in a concentration camp during World War II, is presented through the eyes of Stingo (Peter MacNichol), their young Southern neighbor.

Though other characters appear, especially during the flashbacks, "Sophie's Choice" is largely a three-person drama that relies on subtle interactions. Meryl Streep can always be counted on to give a nuanced performance, but here, especially, she raises the bar. Speaking three languages (including a very realistic portrayal of how foreigners can hesitate and hunt for words when speaking English), going from a haggard Auschwitz inmate to a pretty "blooming rose," consumed by guilt even during the madcap or romantic moments she shares with Nathan, she gives a brilliant performance of a very complex character. Her big scenes with Nazi officers are of course powerful, but I was equally struck by smaller moments: the heartbreaking little flashes of emotion that reveal Sophie's postwar wounds, or the extraordinary conversation she has with a Nazi's daughter.

Kline throws himself into the role of the "fatally glamorous" Nathan and also displays impressive range: he goes from charming to menacing. MacNichol is not up to these (admittedly high) standards. He can play the wide-eyed innocent, but he always seems somewhat thick-headed and lacking in passion. The movie would be more effective if Stingo seemed more truly changed by his experiences with Sophie and Nathan.

Despite Stingo's weakness as a character, I liked the unusual structure that reveals Sophie's story gradually, in flashbacks that draw closer and closer to the ultimate horror. The movie is nicely shot and some of the Brooklyn scenes look as though they actually could have come from a 1940s movie. But no director from the 1940s would have confronted the brutalities of the Holocaust so directly, and few actresses from any era could have given a performance like Streep's.

Although achingly literary at times, moments of true emotional power are rendered by fluid storytelling, Nestor Almendros's haunting cinematography, Marvin Hamlisch's quietly effecting score, a touching performance by Peter MacNichol, and a seminal performance by Meryl Streep; one that Kim Stanley (the celebrated actress/teacher and Oscar nominated mother to Jessica Lange in 'Frances' of the same year) proclaimed, "the titanic portrayal of her generation."

No matter what your initial feelings about this film, I encourage you to go back and take in Streep's dark dance of loss, madness and, finally, sorrowful redemption.