Sophie's Choice
Director: Alan J. Pakula. Cast: Meryl Streep, Peter MacNicol, Kevin Kline, Rita Karin, Stephen D. Newman, Günther Maria Halmer, Melanie Pianka. Screenplay: Alan J. Pakula (based on the novel by William Styron).
Sophie's Choice, Alan J. Pakula's adaptation of the William Styron bestseller, shows considerable hubris in reducing
an epic tragedy to a false and dishonest melodrama. That gesture already risks an extreme understatement of the horrors
that comprised the Holocaust of World War II, an event that Sophie's Choice takes care to demonstrate was a nightmare
afflicting several people besides the Jews. Such a distinction may register with the viewer as anything from a laudable
historicism to a myopic and unnecessary splitting of hairs.
Whatever the case, Sophie's Choice exhibits a far graver callousness in the way it incorporates one woman's narrative
as a survivor of the Holocaust into a larger, crushingly banal story of a young, Southern writer's coming of age in the big
city of New York. I do not wish to argue that the Holocaust only belongs in a story if it occupies the center of the author
or filmmaker's attention, but its particular mode of appropriation in Sophie's Choice—to lend emotion, depth, and undeserved
importance to a shallow story about uninflected characters—trivializes the whole epoch into a lazy writer's tool for
obtaining a vise-grip on the audience's sympathy. Like Bent, Martin Sherman's 1979 play that last year became a motion
picture, Sophie's Choice does not deserve the attention or empathy to which it lays claim by gesturing vaguely to such a
horrendous, tragic event.
A baby-faced Peter MacNicol, later a co-star of TV's Chicago Hope, stars in Sophie's Choice as Stingo, a young
Virginian who has moved into a New York City boardinghouse in 1947 in search of the privacy and inspiration he needs to
produce the Great American Novel he believes exists inside him. Shortly after arriving in New York, Stingo makes the acquaintance
of his upstairs neighbors, Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline), a biological researcher, and his lover, Sophie Zawistowska (Meryl
Streep), a recent immigrant to the States and a survivor of Auschwitz.
In fact, Stingo meets the couple during one of Nathan's violent lashings-out against Sophie, which plays out on the main
staircase of the apartment. Registering the serial number tattooed in Sophie's forearm and the slash scars on her wrists,
Stingo realizes instantly that this woman has known extreme pain in the past; moreover, if Nathan is the raging bull that
he seemed on the stairs, Sophie has not found the happiness Stingo assumes she sought as an arrivée in America. His
fascination with her appears to contain at least some sexual component, but mostly he views Sophie as a more general
exotic, a woman unlike any he has known and—here his writerly inclinations shine through—one capable of teaching him
much about loss, pain, and the other moods he believes might lend substance to his semi-autobiographical memoir of growing
up in the South.
Stingo's own exoticization of Sophie—the ingenuous way in which he views her, at least at first, less as a human being and
more as a source of literary material—follows so closely the pattern of Pakula's own dependence on the Sophie character to
lend dramatic heft to his picture, one almost wonders if the symmetery is intentional. In fact, much suggests that Pakula
is aware of Sophie's structural purpose in the work, and that he knowingly deploys her flashbacks and sorrowful presence to
expose the extent of Stingo's naïveté, the comparatively miniscule context he has for understanding human regret and
sadness. Whether or not Pakula knows what he's doing, however, does not excuse the device, for Sophie's Choice is
first and foremost Stingo's story with Sophie cunningly provided as emotional counterpoint.
Streep is a marvel here, poignant and economical, though her astounding facility with Sophie's many languages and perpetually
haunted aura occasionally work against her and come across as a bit too formal, too studied. (I would have handed her 1982
Best Actress Oscar to Jessica Lange for Frances.) Nonetheless, she does earnest and occasionally
heart-wrenching work during Sophie's flashbacks of her time in Auschwitz, including her servitude in a German Admiral's
house and her unwilling recruitment into covert resistance efforts. The honesty and compassion of her playing makes the
shoehorning of Sophie between two such barren, hackneyed storylines—Stingo's literary emergence and Nathan's increasingly
apparent madness—seem all the more regrettable.
Pakula, who perpetrated what may very possibly be the least visually inspired movie of the 1990s in The Pelican Brief,
is similarly uninterested in shot composition or directorial point of view in this project, which maintains throughout the
august, inflated feel of a self-proclaimed Event Movie, a picture that forsakes discernible feeling in the interest of its
own unimpeachable credentials as art. Such tendencies mar most of the aspects of the filmmaking, from Kevin Kline's frequently
undisciplined performance to the fulsome Pat Conroy-ness of Stingo's voice-over narration. Marvin Hamlisch contributes a
moving score, but like Streep's performance, it is too often submerged in the grayness of its surroundings to evoke as much
feeling as it could.
I am not sure whether Pakula and/or Styron (admitting that I have not read the novel) were not sufficiently confident in the
power of Sophie's story to let it stand independently, or not confident enough in Stingo's narrative to offer it up free of
such extensive subplots. The disparity between the two tales is most apparent by the end, when Sophie's most painful admission
is juxtaposed against the bottoming out of MacNicol's character arc; Pakula even designs the script so that a romantic
encounter follows upon Sophie's confession, so that Stingo may describe her as the "goddess" of his "lustfulness." No
question this boy doesn't understand much about what Sophie tells him; I wish I could state with any certainty that the
filmmakers do, either. Grade: D+
- Academy Award Nominations and *Winners:
- *Best Actress: Meryl Streep
- Best Adapted Screenplay: Alan J. Pakula
- Best Cinematography: Nestor Almendros
- Best Costume Design: Albert Wolsky
- Best Original Score: Marvin Hamlisch
- Golden Globe Nominations and *Winners:
- Best Picture (Drama)
- *Best Actress (Drama): Emma Thompson
- Best New Film Star (Male): Kevin Kline
- Other Awards:
- New York Film Critics Circle—Best Actress: Meryl Streep
- Los Angeles Film Critics Association—Best Actress: Meryl Streep
- National Society of Film Critics—Best Actress: Meryl Streep
- National Board of Review—Best Picture; Best Actress: Meryl Streep