Silkwood

Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep) lives in Oklahoma with her boyfriend Drew Stephens (Kurt Russell) and best friend lesbian Dolly Pelliker (Cher). Her kids live with their father in Texas. The three friends are low-skilled workers at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Site where they manufacture fuel rods for nuclear reactors. With mounting work and lax safety, Karen starts to talk union causing tension with the company. Eventually, she gets mysteriously irradiated.

Meryl Streep is the best. She delivers a fully-fleshed out character of real depth. The movie is a bit slow and meandering. It would be great to have a tighter and more direct film. Then there is the final text. It seems like a bunch of stuff from the legal department to safeguard against lawsuits. They may as well fictionalize the movie instead. The performances are terrific. The story is compelling.

What does your own hero look like ?

How do you judge people ?

When should you let go ? And when should you stick around ?

With "amazing grace", the beautiful Meryl Streep and Karen Silkwood have both tried to answer our questions. This wonderful movie wasn't about Silkwood's bravery in demanding people's absolutely basic rights only.

Most of people judge others by their own definition of "honour". You tell a friend about how this woman sleeps with everyone and the word goes on about how this promiscuous woman is a devil. This portrayal of Karen Silkwood will definitely conquer your image and your ways of judgment. As you can see her life ends, you'll know what really matters in life and what real honour looks like. You'll know that each one of us has their own demons, and some more than others, maybe for the bigger part, because they've witnessed what the rest didn't in their lives. You can never judge this woman saying she left her children when she's fighting for the framed pictures they're taking from her as they've found her house's contaminated, you can never judge her emotional and sexual behaviour when you see the look - to Drew- in her eyes before she dies and you can never judge the quality of her life given her psychological disturbance. This beautiful woman fought for what really matters in this life: end of fear .. end of blackmail for money and food. She's a hero by all means, defying all sorts of authorities with absolutely no support most of the time. You can see the struggles of being with someone who wouldn't save the world like you're trying to, but turns out to love you as you are with all your demons.

The real lesson for most people in this movie was about bravery and courage, but for me, it was mostly about acceptance, judgment and what really matters in this life.I can't thank Meryl Streep, Cher, Kurt Russel and Director Mike Nichols enough for this masterpiece, especially the ever-amazing and graceful, Mrs Streep .. You've taught me more than I've ever learnt from anybody in my own life.

Intense 1980s flick that is based on the true story of Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep in an Oscar-nominated role), a woman at a plutonium plant who began to talk about what really went on at the facility where she was employed. It seems that nuclear tampering would lead to the poisoning of the plant's employees and the pollution of the environment. Silkwood was about to talk to the New York Times about the Oklahoma plant when she died under mysterious circumstances in a car accident. The audience knows what is going to happen, but it is getting there that is the fascinating part. Mike Nichols' Oscar-nominated direction is arguably the best of his career, with the exception of his work on "The Graduate". Cher (also Oscar-nominated) proved that she was a legitimate actress as Streep's lesbian co-worker. Kurt Russell also gives his finest performance as Streep's on-again-off-again boyfriend. However with all that said, it is Meryl Streep who gives one of her finest performances in this memorable, remarkable and important motion picture. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

The lives of working class Americans are shamefully under-represented by Hollywood, and when a poor person is depicted (as something other than a criminal), it's almost always with the subtext of hope and the American dream. But hope isn't what drives someone, like the real-life Karen Silkwood, to risk her life working with plutonium for the only employer in a company town. Silkwood didn't find hope, but she did get scared, and angry, and put her job (and those of her colleagues) at stake to uncover dangerous practices before dying a mysterious death. 'Silkwood' the movie doesn't give us the glib conclusions of a conspiracy thriller (it refrains from giving an opinion on her cause of death), but it does give an excellent portrait of life at the bottom, and the mounting sense of claustrophobia and paranoia that accompanied Karen's perilous voyage of discovery. Meryl Streep does an excellent job in the title role, portraying a woman gradually losing her sanity, and the whole cast is good, even Cher in an unglamorous role. In conclusion, this is a serious and important film; and a reminder for the fortunate how hard, and ugly, life can be, even in the "land of the free".

I saw "Silkwood" again recently, and it seemed to make sense of the past 25 years of my life -- I finally understood why I began doing what I do.

When I was sixteen years old I broke both legs, and was out of school for two months. But twice a week my father, who worked nights as a security guard at the Kerr-McGee office building, took me downtown to the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, to watch the proceedings of the Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee trial during morning sessions. He insisted I go, he said, "So you'll learn something." I learned a lot about people then, and about the law, and the experience certainly took my mind off my own physical discomfort.

Mr. Paul, an excellent corporate lawyer, represented Kerr-McGee, which leased the operation of the plutonium plant in Crescent, Oklahoma, about thirty miles north of here. Mr. Spence represented the children of Karen Silkwood. Mr. Paul and his six associates seemed to change their suits every day. Perhaps they didn't want to see like the "great gray wall" -- which was the stereotype of corporate lawyers. But the net effect of seven men striving to seem individual was that of a great plumed serpent preparing to devour any small creature in its path. Mr. Spence, on the other hand, wore the same buckskin fringed coat each day. Each day he would place his Stetson on his table. He and the hat sat in splendid silence while the Kerr-McGee attorneys conferred and whispered.

Both men counted on the sentiments of a working-class jury. Mr. Paul figured people would recognize the contribution made to the community by Kerr-McGee, a locally owned business with world-wide influence, which provided many jobs to people here. Mr. Spence counted on them harboring deep suspicions, after having been treated like throw-away people for so many years by other employers of the same size as Kerr-McGee. My father was such a person. He worked for Kerr-McGee, but he distrusted corporate politics, and rightly figured they'd let him go right before he qualified for a pension. Later, that's exactly what happened.

Mr. Spence has sued the corporation for 2 million dollars. But the jury awarded him, and Karen Silkwood's children, five times that much. Later, thanks to an excellent foundation laid by Mr. Paul, Kerr-McGee was able to get the conviction overturned, then eventually settled for a payment of 1 million dollars to the grown children. Of course, Mr. Spence took about half of that, and after taxes, I suppose each of the three children had about enough to get a college education, or to buy a new truck and have a down payment on a house.

That's what happened to me. My father died not longer after being let go by Kerr-McGee. There was enough insurance money to pay for my college education. Then my mother died. For many years the social atmosphere in the Kerr-McGee offices, where one of my friends worked as a draftsman, prevented anyone from ever saying anything good about Karen Silkwood. I will not repeat was generally said about her, or her social life, her motivations or her politics.

I never met her, but I did see and hear the people who were for Karen Silkwood, and those who were against her, at the trial. It was clear to me that whatever else she may have been, she was a courageous person. By the time the movie was released, I was a junior in college, and suddenly changed my major to drama. After graduation, I found work with a film production company which filmed herds of cattle -- "Video Auction" was its name. Then I went to California, where I taught drama, or worked as a stage manager, for twenty years.

Watching "Silkwood" last week, for the first time in 24 years, reminded me of what the trial, and later the movie, showed me -- the part of you that lasts is what you have done for others. The lawyers will take everything else.