Sophie's Choice (1982)
Meryl Streep confirmed her status as the Queen of Accents with
her Oscar-winning turn in this moving adaptation of William
Styron's best-selling novel.
Yet, for all the telling revelations about Sophie's past, it is
the interaction between the three central characters that gives
the story its strength. It is strange, therefore, that Kevin Kline
and Peter MacNicol were overlooked by the Academy.
As Sophie Zawistowska, the beautiful, tragic Polish immigrant
who survived Auschwitz to be tortured by her memories in post-war
Brooklyn, Streep is positively mesmerising.
Except for its self-conscious voice-over narration, this movie
prunes away the clutter of Styron's novel, leaving a haunting film
that leaves the audience wasted and weak from excitement and
grief.
The time is 1947; Stingo, a twenty-two-year-old writer from
rural Virginia, finds himself renting a room in a pink boarding
house in Brooklyn. Almost immediately, he is drawn to his exotic
upstairs neighbours: Sophie, with her gossamer summer dresses, her
sad, liquid eyes, and her trembling hands; and Nathan, her Jewish
lover - a neurotic clown with a Jekyll and Hyde personality,
sometimes charming and charismatic, other times violent and
sadistic.
This unlikely trio become inseparable; despite the ominous
warning cloud that hovers overhead, Stingo finds his new friends
glamorous and fascinating, developing crushes on them both. And so
begins a love story that changes Stingo's life forever.
The deeper he sinks into his new friends' lives, the more he
learns about the mysteries and lies and secrets that enshroud them
both.
In flashbacks that look like black and white newsreel footage,
we learn the truth about Sophie - including her resistance work in
Warsaw and the horrors of the concentration camp where she
survived using her secretarial skills to work and flirt with Nazi
commandant Rudolf Hess while her children were exterminated.
Nathan, who rescued her after she passed out from anaemia and
hunger at the New York Public Library, has taken the place of
Sophie's Nazi torturers, punishing her for her consuming guilt in
a sadomasochistic love affair. And poor, shattered Stingo, who
loves them both, is the only one who knows the truth.
Kevin Kline, making his film debut, is a brooding, handsome
Nathan, filling the spaces with energetic rages and sunny
sweetness in a complex performance rich with colour and contrast.
But Meryl Streep is the swirling emotional vortex. Butchering
the English language, struggling to forget the past, trying to
pull the jagged shards of her life together, her work is so
natural and full of unexpected insights that she makes each scene
a marvellous adventure.
And in not one but three different
languages (In the flashbacks, she works with the Polish actors in
Polish and with the German actors in German).
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