Sophie's Choice
Associated Film Distribution / ITC Entertainment / Keith Barish Productions / Universal, 157m., 1982, color, screenplay and directed by Alan J. Pakula.
cast :
Meryl Streep (Sophie)
Kevin Kline (Nathan Landau)
Peter MacNicol (Stingo)
Rita Karin (Yetta)
Stephen D. Newma (Larry)
Greta Turken (Leslie Lapidus)
Josh Mostel (Morris Fink)
Marcell Rosenblatt (Astrid Weinstein)
Moishe Rosenfeld (Moishe Rosenblum)
Robin Bartlett (Lillian Grossman)
Eugene Lipinski (Polish Professor)
John Rothman (Librarian)
Joseph Leon (Dr. Blackstock)
David Wohl (English Teacher)
Nina Polan (Woman in English Class)
Available on DVD
The 1950's witnessed the emergence of Virginia-born William Syron, whose first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), full of stream-of-consciousness narration, shows the influence of William Faulkner. With later novels he carved out his own territory. For The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), he won the Pulitzer Prize, but his crowning achievement may well be Sophie's Choice, the intricate story that examines the complex nature of evil and guilt through the experiences of a young Polish woman who survived Auschwitz.
Kevin Kline as Nathan Landau, Meryl Streep as Sophie
Alan J. Pakula's screenplay proved an unsually faithful adaptation. The story opens in the late 1940's when Stingo moves into a Brooklyn boarding house where he finds himself involved with two of its tenants: Sophie, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps and her lover Nathan who lies about his job as a research chemist. Initially the relationship between the two lovers appears sedate and average, except for a darkly comic and foreboding
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Kevin Kline as Nathan Landau, Meryl Streep as Sophie, and Peter MacNicol as Stingo in Sophie's Choice
scene in which Sophie and Nathan talk to Stingo at the same time, each so loud as to drown out the other. Stingo soon comes to understand that Nathan is unbalanced, and he questions why Sophie stays with him. Through a series of flashbacks, Stingo learns that in the concentration camp, a guard forced Sophie to choose which child she could keep with her.
At this point the film makes its only serious departure. In the novel Sophie choses to give up her son, the older of the two children, reasoning that he would be better able to survive on his own. Although both her children die, she is burdened with such enormous guilt that her later attachment makes sense. Nathan is Jewish, and the Jews died by the millions in concentration camps, just as her son died. However, the film reverses the choice. In the flashback where the guard forces her to choose, she keeps her son and sends away her daughter.
After this basic miscalculation, the film returns to the novel for its conclusion. Fascinated by Sophie, Stingo convinces her to leave Nathan, and they have a brief affair. But Stingo does not understand the depth of Sophie's guilt, and she returns to Nathan. When Stingo
goes looking for her, he discovers both Sophie and Nathan dead, the victims of a double suicide.
The changes in the film failed to dampen Styron's admiration for it. "I thought the film was a remarkably faithful adaptation," he said. "The message of the book was retained. Of course, it could not contain any of the purely philosophical points that were made, but I thought it did an awfully good job of capturing the basic outline."
Pakula's film was nominated for an Academy Award, and Meryl Streep won a Best Acress Award. Janet Maslin of the New York Times (Dec. 10, 1982) said of the film: "Thanks in large part to Miss Streep's bravura performance, it's a film that casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell.... the book's most overpowering quality is its inexorable momentum, and that has been preserved to the fullest. A suspenseful, troubling novel, it makes for a movie that is even more so. "
[One interesting note on the casting: When William Styron was writing the novel, he envisioned Ursula Andress in the role of Sophie.]
Rating: A-
--reviewed by Jim Hitt |
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