Cast: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol

Director: Alan Pakula

Screenplay: William Styron

Running time: 2 hrs 30 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Meryl Streep’s name has now penetrated the pop colloquialism as the epitome of just about anything e.g. Rolls Royce for cars, Häagen-Dazs for ice cream. That sums up pretty much for an actress nominated for fifteen times, showcasing probably Earth’s most impressive acting CV, whose performances boast a more comprehensive array of shades than a Dulux paint colour chart – she’s entirely a league of her own. In her first and only Oscar for Best Actress (she won Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer), Streep is genuinely exceptional in the shoes of the tormented Polish immigrant Sophie Zawistowski, a complex, morally distraught woman who survived the Auschwitz nightmare and lived another day in 1940s Brooklyn with a mentally-challenged lover. It is a diamond of a performance, hard-cut, sparkling yet one that could withstand the test of time and will break your hearts. She spends almost half of the movie with red-rimmed eyes and recollecting excruciating memories, but that she does not make it descend to mawkishness. Her Sophie is a guilt-ridden human being who does not beg for audience sympathy, and the film, instead of providing a straightforward narrative, unravels her past in flashback fashion, peeling character layers upto the very last revelation of the titular ‘choice’ she made.


Sophie’s Choice is temptingly vague for its social and political mores, but it’s all better for that. It’s a Holocaust film, but unlike archetypal Holocaust films like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Lanzmann’s Shoah, it doesn’t centre on either the Jews or the Nazis and rather binds the point-of-view from a Polish. It actually follows a two-hander narrative strand, Peter MacNicol’s Stingo, a Southern writer who becomes a witness to the turbulent affair of Sophie and her feverish, dysfunctional lover (a brilliant Kevin Kline), and then Sophie’s. The latter’s flashback, although undeniably harrowing, appears conventional and even distracting at some points but they are excellently staged with washed-out, sepia cinematography with a grief-stricken, pallid and frail-looking Streep braving the horror of a concentration camp. The relationship between the trio reminds us of a ménage-a-trois in Jules et Jim brio. But all in all, this is Streep’s show. It is her emotionally contorted face when she sees her child being wrenched away from her that painfully wrenches us. It is also her face at the final fading scenes that reminds us about human fallibility, and that the Holocaust wasn’t only about the Jews or the Nazis but also about people who make the cruellest of choices in the most cruel of times.


VERDICT:

At first, this seems like a Jules et Jim ménage-à-trois caper in what appears to be a Holocaust film, a tad uneven at middle-point but ultimately heart-wrenching. Sophie’s Choice makes for a hard, cruel viewing – but once watched, its moral and emotional complexity will haunt you. Streep delivers a fine-cut, exceptionally observed performance.