Sophie’s Choice (1982); AFI #91
The next film on the list is the often referenced but not as often seen Sophie’s Choice (1982). This particular movie seems surprisingly low on the AFI list (#91) for how well known it is. This might be Meryl Streep’s most well known role and a main reason why she is considered an A-list actor. She won all of the best actress awards that year for her performance including the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and all the major US critic awards. She had to learn quite a bit of German and Polish for the role and proves herself as a truly “academic” actor. This is so much so that it might actually be to the detriment of the other actors, but I want to review the story line before going into that:
SPOILER WARNING!!! I wasn’t going to spoil “the choice”, but it is the first thing that comes up when you google the movie, so I will go ahead and spoil the whole thing. MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!!!
The year is 1947 and the US is on a high note following the success of the country in WW2 which came right after the Great Depression. I didn’t know that Sophie was not the only lead character when I first saw the movie, so I was surprised to find the story is from the view of Stingo (Peter MacNicol), who is a writer from Virginia that moves up to Brooklyn to author his first novel. He ends up staying at a pink house with strange housemates upstairs that seem to both fight and play loudly. The people upstairs are the titular Sophie (Meryl Streep) and her lover Nathan (Kevin Kline). The couple invite Stingo to come up but then they get in a fight and Nathan storms out and Stingo gets a chance to meet just Sophie. She has a frail, almost wounded bird quality about her that makes men want to help her, and this hits Stingo immediately. She is a Polish immigrant with death camp number tattoos and suicide scars on her wrists. She has obviously suffered and it gives her a quality of somebody who has survived through her strength but is on the verge of giving up on life, and that makes people want to save her.
Nathan comes back the next day and apologizes to everyone and it is apparent that he is an eccentric personality that is prone to occasions of rage. That does not seem to bother Stingo and the three become best friends. The building of the relationship covers a large part of the film and a lot of the “choices” occur during the last half. At this point, I thought that Sophie’s choice was between these two men the first time I saw the movie. It is a choice, but it is not the one that everyone talks about. That is toward the very end of the movie.
Sophie talks about how much she loves her father and how he was a great man, but Stingo finds out that she is lying when he is looking for her after a fight with Nathan. He goes to the Polish immigration center and finds out that her father was a Nazi sympathizer that believed in the extermination of the Jews. Sophie actually hated him towards wartime, and took on a Polish lover that was fighting against the Nazi occupation. This lover asked her to help and she decided not to do it and her lover and his sister were killed a couple of weeks later. This is not the big choice.
Flash back to when the Nazis start killing off the Polish academics without really checking for credentials, so Sophie’s father and husband were killed and she was sent to Auschwitz with her two children. We are told that she was separated from her children and she ends up working at the house for the head of the camp (she speaks German and doesn’t look Polish, so she is chosen for this work). She is forced to choose between helping some other prisoners to get a radio and help the resistance in the camp or work with the Germans to help her survive. She decides to be a good prisoner after almost getting caught trying to steal a radio. She then barters her body so that she can convince the Nazi commander to make sure her son is OK. He does not keep his word. This is also not the major choice. This 20 minute flash back is probably the best part of the movie, so make sure to take it all in.
Back in the current time of Stingo, and we find out that Nathan is actually crazy and a schizophrenic. His brother asks Stingo to spy on the couple because Nathan is having worsening moments of rage. Nathan finds out that Stingo talked to his brother and also thinks that Stingo is sleeping with Sophie, so he threatens to kill them. Stingo and Sophie leave quickly and Stingo offers to marry her and have her move back to Virginia and raise a family while he writes. She does not want this (still not the choice) and she explains why. A flashback shows that she was given a choice by a Nazi commander upon arrival at Auschwitz to send one child to the gas chamber and one to the kinder care. She pleads for him not to make her choose and with the repercussion of both dying she sends her baby daughter to be killed. This is the choice. She was forced to choose one of her children to die.
Back in the present in the film, Sophie gets drunk and sleeps with Stingo just to try and work through the pain. The next day she is gone and has returned to Nathan. Stingo goes back to Brooklyn and finds that Nathan and Sophie are dead in bed together in what appears to be a double suicide are a murder by Nathan. The movie ends shortly after.
This entire movie is made around the character of Sophie and the choices that she has to make to survive. In the end, whether she kills herself or she allows Nathan to kill her, she decides that she cannot live with all of the choices that she has made. A true tragedy, it tells the tale of a woman that loses everything that she lives for and Meryl Streep plays Sophie at each stage magnificently.
Her performance is so good that she actually makes the other actors look kind of crappy. This was the first film for both Peter MacNicol and Kevin Kline and they both feel almost miscast. Kline feels like a Shakespearean actor that is placed in a modern tragedy and he is trying to shape the role to him. He is not the main role of the story and he just makes Streep shine even though he is the male lead (maybe?). He received some best new actor nominations that year, but that is exactly what his performance was, a good first try. MacNicol comes across as annoyed and I constantly wondered why he didn’t just leave.
I think that this story is better expressed through a book than through a movie because the peripheral characters need to be fleshed out and that kind of time is just not available in a film. I have never had the chance to read the book, but I want to every time that I see the movie. I do feel that Sophie is well represented in the film, but this is mostly because of the acting of Streep and less from the screen writing or directing.
When seeing if anybody wanted to watch the movie with me, I was given a lot of flack about a “chick flick” because my housemates thought that Sophie was choosing between two men. They were also unaware that the film was about surviving a Nazi death camp. This was surprising to me since just that year Carson Kressley stated that choosing a winner amongst Miss USA contestants was a veritable Sophie’s choice and was immediately chastised for comparing choosing a winner in a beauty pageant to a horrific choice of picking one of your children to live during the Holocaust. The hyperbole is not lost on me although I didn’t think the comment was particularly funny. I remember in 2007 when an episode of 30 Rock got similar blowback when an immigrant hooker character was dubbed “Sophie’s Choice.” The movie seems to be poor subject matter for comedy (good or bad) even decades after coming out.
So is this movie worthy of a spot on the AFI list? Absolutely. The name is so well known in American culture that it is referenced and assumed about with many people never seeing the movie. Also, the film contains one of the top 10 film acting performances of all time. Meryl Streep puts on a clinic portraying a ghost of a person who has died inside and is just looking for any reason to keep living. Would I recommend the movie? Yes! God yes! In fact, I think that my housemates’ response to the movie might be more common than it should be and a lot of people do not watch the movie because of assumptions. I strongly recommend the film and especially recommend the flashback scenes. I great movie to actually see and not just make assumptions about because somebody spoiled the choice.
