I’ve never been fully aboard the Meryl Streep hype train. I’ve always felt she’s a really good actress of course, but her reputation as the greatest of her generation and one of the most important stars in Hollywood always felt a bit disingenuous at best, industry mandated at worst. I mean she’s an Academy darling, holding the record for the most nominations (21) of any actor by quite a lot, many of which even her most ardent admirers would admit were mere tokens. I’m not a fan of her kind of celebrity royalty and I just haven’t really been blown away by most of her performances that I’ve seen during my lifetime.
But therein lies the rub, and I realize I actually haven’t seen much of her work of the 70s and 80s (or granted, The Devil Wears Prada for that matter), which is where the icon of Meryl Streep was born: the deeply committed, accent variant, self-challenging and arguably Oscar pursuant actress who was in fairly short order elevated to the esteem of Katherine Hepburn and Vivien Leigh (if you google “great actresses” hers is the first image that shows up). And no film is more indicative of that reputation than one of its earliest examples, that won her her second Oscar, Sophie’s Choice, the romance-Holocaust melodrama in which she plays a haunted Polish immigrant and death camp survivor ensconced in a love triangle within her Brooklyn apartment complex.
I’ll be honest, Sophie’s Choice as a whole doesn’t click for me the way it did for so many critics and audiences in 1982. It’s aptly made, written and directed by Alan J. Pakula of All the Presidents’ Men and Klute and is of course performed very well as I’ll get to, but it doesn’t quite come together, largely due to the disparate story threads that never wholly unify in a meaningful way. The Holocaust hangs over the film from the start of course, Sophie’s camp number apparent from her first meeting with point of view character and resident Nick Carraway, Stingo (Peter MacNicol, in his second film role) -but it’s mostly suggested as a background character detail to the relationship drama between her, Stingo, and her capriciously abusive lover Nathan (Kevin Kline, in his debut film role), only for it to take over the plot completely in the second act. This structure is rather jarring, especially when a substantial middle portion of the movie is given over to a flashback to Sophie’s experiences in Poland, from turning against her Nazi-sympathizing father, joining a resistance movement with her husband, and ultimately her time spent in Auschwitz after her husband is executed and her children are separated from her where she attempted to bargain with camp commandant Rudolf Höss. It’s all dramatic and interesting, but feels so alien to the New York love triangle story of the film up to that point, which already was dealing with domestic abuse and social stigmas against immigrants without the intense weight of the Holocaust to completely dwarf and render insignificant such themes.
Because that is what the one storyline does to the other. Nathan’s paranoid schizophrenia and his masking of it within quasi-intellectualism, his obsession with the Holocaust which distresses Sophie, Stingo’s naivete and forlorn romanticism, the curious non-sexual menage a trois relationship that develops between the three, and even Sophie’s experiences with prejudice in America (such as one extremely detestable librarian refusing to understand her request for Emily Dickinson books) all becomes rather pointless in lieu of the devastating drama of her past. Though I don’t fully agree with her take on it, I feel Pauline Kael was correct in noting, “the whole plot is based on a connection that isn’t there -the connection between Sophie and Nathan’s relationship and what the Nazis did to the Jews.” In fact, the Jewish trauma from the Holocaust barely factors into the film at all, the script making a point to confirm that Sophie is Catholic, an element even more significant in William Styron’s original book, which garnered expected controversy for essentially trying to “All Lives Matter” the Holocaust. Nathans’ Jewishness thus doesn’t serve much of a purpose, except to possibly account for his concentration camp fixation and passionate hatred of Nazis (one of his few noble character traits), but these themselves have little significance either, the film never adequately delving into what this says about his and Sophie’s relationship.
The movie is seemingly full of these little missed opportunities, ideas and themes that could have been expanded on. But then I realize that isn’t the purpose of Sophie’s Choice. This movie has always been one hundred per cent an actors’ movie: a chance for an actor to show off their skills. Meryl Streep was aware of this and it’s why she campaigned so hard to get the part. Pakula’s first choice was apparently Liv Ullmann, and though she might have been a bit old for the part in 1982, I would have loved to have seen that version. But Streep beat out numerous authentic European actresses for the part that would define her career for the next decade. I don’t mean to malign Streep for this, it’s what all actors, and especially rising Hollywood stars of her calibre were doing and continue to do -and at the time there was still a not-inconsiderable deficit of interesting leading female roles. You can hardly blame Streep for chasing this one in the same way the women stars of the 1930s chased Scarlett O’Hara. And ultimately you can’t deny the results.
Streep is tremendous in this part! She’s showing off sure, but the lengths she went to to do so are undeniably impressive. She not only lost weight as many an actor has been known to do, for the Holocaust flashbacks, but damn near perfected a Polish accent (one of the most difficult) and learned a great degree of passable Polish and German on top of that. Though it often happens the other way, it’s rare to see an American actor spend so much of a film acting in a different language (Steven Yeun in Burning and Awkwafina in The Farewell are recent examples, but both knew the language going in). And Streep did all of this while maintaining the truth and believability of her character. It was perhaps the first time I didn’t actually see Meryl, but rather the person she was portraying. And over the course of the film I grew quite fond of Sophie Zawistowski, her secrets and scars. She was brought to life so well and I’m certainly not going to argue Streep didn’t deserve that Oscar, obvious though it may have been. I don’t know if I’d quite go so far as to say her turn in Sophie’s Choice is one of the greatest movie performances ever, as it’s popularly seen to be, but it is an unquestionably powerful one that towers over just about all others of its kind -ushering in the typical Oscar-bait prestige drama role we know today.
Streep certainly overshadows the film, but I would like to point out too that Kevin Kline makes a hell of a first impression. His signature verbose pomposity and wit is on full display from the start, as is his talent for loathsome characters (though of course Nathan is nowhere near as fun as Otto from A Fish Called Wanda). The role requires him to flip on a dime between confident and charismatic and disturbed and dangerous, and with over a decade of Shakespearean training and acclaimed work on stage, he’s more than up for the task, filling the screen with the presence of someone who might have always been acting for it. Peter MacNicol on the other hand is pretty irritably passive; a character who’s written as a bit of a wet blanket and a terribly dull point-of-view figure. MacNicol’s giving it his all but he just doesn’t quite rise to the occasion. It would be a few years before Hollywood knew what to do with him and start casting him in eccentric roles in comedies. He also is in the unfortunate position of having to share the role with a poor narrator (Josef Sommer) who delivers the already awkward voiceover dialogue with strange emphasis and inappropriate cadences.
But of course what everyone remembers about Sophie’s Choice, apart from Streep’s performance, is the big third act reveal that really is a killer twist, just one without a whole lot of relevance to the primary narrative. The final flashback shows that Sophie upon entering Auschwitz was forced to choose which of her two children would be sent to the gas chamber and which would merely be sent to a childrens’ camp. She chose to sacrifice her son and has been tormented by that shame ever since. It is a horrible thing, incredibly tragic, psychologically painful, and brutally believable on par with the famous incest reveal of Chinatown -like that film, seemingly coming out of nowhere. But like everything else related to the flashbacks it deepens Sophie’s character without really factoring into the rest of what’s going on in the present, not much hinted at in specificity until Stingo talks of having children with her -before then indecipherable among the other more general pain she carries from merely living through the death camp. It’s excruciating, captivating drama, but weak structure.
Yet as much as I harp on about the movies’ story and structural flaws, those aren’t part of the legacy Sophie’s Choice has attained. Rather it’s Streep’s performance, the versatility she demonstrated, and the strength of that twist that has gone on to enter the public lexicon when referring to such an impossible choice. For those things, I may respect this movie more than I like it, but then that’s probably what it was going for all along. This wasn’t meant to stand as a great movie necessarily, but as a vehicle for Meryl Streep to solidify her status as a Hollywood heavyweight, and by god if she didn’t do just that.
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