Continuing with our look back to 1982, here’s something that made its mark on the Oscars that year and still gets mentioned as the highlight of its star’s career, or even among Hollywood performances in general—it’s Sophie’s Choice.
Based on the novel of the same name, the film initially follows a young writer played by Peter MacNicol, who moves to New York to find himself in the midst between the somewhat manic Nathan (Keven Kline) and his Polish migrant girlfriend, Sophie, played by the de facto star here Meryl Streep. Between their relationships and tribulations, Sophie’s past and especially one gruelling decision she was forced to make inevitably and inexorably comes to the light.
By most accounts the film is fairly loyal to the book—perhaps a little too loyal, with a runtime that’s pretty hefty especially for early 80s standards at two and a half hours. With something like that, especially with a relatively minimal main cast, you need a lot riding on the actors—performance and presentation will always trump loyalty to source material at the end of the day (just look at the Atlas Shrugged movies, if you have absolutely nothing better to do). Kline is certainly enjoyable as a somewhat bipolar character who likes to dance and twist all over the set, and MacNicol, while certainly not bad, is perhaps the weaker link here.
But of course, we’re all here for Streep—who only seems to turn up her performance as the film goes on. Streep even went as far as to learning conversational German and Polish for the role—and, well, as far as the latter goes, I am able to say she does a commendable enough job all things considered. Perhaps not perfect, but I’d hardly demand she be able to roll ‘Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz’ right off the tongue.
And all this comes to a head at the film’s strongest segment—about halfway through, we finally get to delve into what drove Sophie to where she was with a flashback scene dealing with, of course, the most uplifting of topics, the Holocaust. With every scene here, Streep sells an utterly forlorn look of someone who’s desperate just to survive—every moment building to her dealing with the sadism to be inflicted by her occupiers. It’s all things that ring depressingly true—I say this as someone who’s met those who lived first-hand amidst such events, and knew those that needed to take their own harrowing means to survive. And as for the choice itself? Well, need I remind you that even Spielberg had to tone down the acts of the historical commandant in Schindler’s List just to make it all believable…
That’s where the film hits its height, and makes the rest seem even just a little bit redundant. In many ways, it reminds me in feel and presentation of some of the extra-long TV movies or miniseries you’d see emerging around this era—but elevated of course by a couple of key factors here. While not perfect, it’s a film that hits you hard enough with its strongest efforts that it’s not hard to understand the impact it made…
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