Sophie's Choice (film)


Sophie's Choice is a 1982 American drama film directed by Alan J. Pakula, who adapted William Styron's 1979 novel of the same name. Meryl Streep stars as Sophie, a Polish immigrant who shares a boarding house in Brooklyn with her tempestuous lover, Nathan, and a young writer, Stingo.
Streep's highly acclaimed performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film was also nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Music, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Plot

In 1947, Stingo moves to Brooklyn to write a novel, and is befriended by Sophie Zawistowski, a Polish immigrant, and her emotionally unstable lover, Nathan Landau. Nathan is constantly jealous, and when he is in one of his violent mood swings, he convinces himself that Sophie is unfaithful to him, and he abuses and harasses her. A flashback shows how Nathan first met Sophie after her immigration to the U.S. when she nearly died due to anemia.
Sophie tells Stingo that before she came to the U.S., her husband and father were killed in a German work camp, and that she was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Stingo later learns from a college professor that Sophie's father was a Nazi sympathizer. When Stingo confronts Sophie with this, she admits the truth and tells him about her war-time lover, Józef, who lived with his half-sister, Wanda, and was a leader in the Resistance. Wanda tried to convince Sophie to translate some stolen Gestapo documents, but Sophie declined, fearing she might endanger her children. Two weeks later, Józef was murdered by the Gestapo, and Sophie was arrested and sent to Auschwitz with her children.
Nathan tells Sophie and Stingo that he is doing groundbreaking research at a pharmaceutical company, but Nathan's physician brother tells Stingo that Nathan is a paranoid schizophrenic, and that all of the schools that Nathan attended were "expensive funny farms". Nathan is not a biologist as he claims. He does have a job at a pharmaceutical firm, but it is in the library, which his brother obtained for him, and he only occasionally assists with research.
After Nathan believes Sophie has betrayed him again, he calls Sophie and Stingo on the telephone and fires a gun in a violent rage. Sophie and Stingo flee to a hotel. She reveals to him that, upon arrival at Auschwitz, she was forced to choose which one of her two children would be gassed and which would proceed to the labor camp. To avoid having both children killed, she chose her son, Jan, to be sent to the children's camp, and her daughter, Eva, to be sent to her death.
Sophie and Stingo have sex, but while Stingo is sleeping, Sophie returns to Nathan. Sophie and Nathan commit suicide by taking cyanide. Stingo recites the poem "Ample Make This Bed" by Emily Dickinson — the American poet that Sophie was fond of reading.
Stingo moves to a small farm that his father recently inherited in southern Virginia to finish writing his novel.

Cast

Styron wrote the novel with Ursula Andress in mind for the part of Sophie, and Slovak actress Magdaléna Vášáryová was also considered. Streep was very determined to get the role. After obtaining a bootlegged copy of the script, she went after Pakula, and threw herself on the ground, begging him to give her the part. Pakula's first choice was Liv Ullmann, for her ability to project the foreignness that would add to her appeal in the eyes of an impressionable, romantic Southerner.
The film was mostly shot in New York City, with Sophie's flashback scenes shot afterwards in Yugoslavia.
Production for the film, at times, was more like a theatrical set than a film set. Pakula allowed the cast to rehearse for three weeks, and was open to improvisation from the actors, "spontaneous things", according to Streep. Streep had to lose a lot of weight to film the scenes in Yugoslavia at the concentration camp.

Release

The film had its premiere at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles on Wednesday, December 8, 1982 and then opened December 10 in nine theatres in New York City ; Los Angeles ; San Francisco; San Jose, California; Chicago; Dallas; Washington D.C.; and Toronto.

Reception

Critical reception

Sophie's Choice received positive reviews. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it currently holds a 78% rating based on 40 reviews, with an average score of 6.91/10. On Metacritic, the film has a 68 out of 100 rating based on 9 critics, signifying "generally favorable reviews"."
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars, calling it "a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie. It is about three people who are faced with a series of choices, some frivolous, some tragic. As they flounder in the bewilderment of being human in an age of madness, they become our friends, and we love them." Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, finding it "not as powerful or as involving" as the novel but praising Streep for a "striking performance."
Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Though it's far from a flawless movie, 'Sophie's Choice' is a unified and deeply affecting one. Thanks in large part to Miss Streep's bravura performance, it's a film that casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post stated, "There is greatness in the extraordinary performances of Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol, who endow the principal characters of 'Sophie's Choice' with appealing, ultimately heartbreaking individuality and romantic glamor."
Not all reviews were positive. Todd McCarthy at Variety called it "a handsome, doggedly faithful and astoundingly tedious adaptation of William Styron's best-seller. Despite earnest intentions and top talent involved, lack of chemistry among the three leading players and over-elaborated screenplay make this a trying experience to sit through." Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Although many of the book's characters have been cut away, and with them some of its torrent of words, the film feels claustrophobic, prolix and airless to the point of stupefaction... Yet, whatever the film's overall problems, the role of Sophie, its beautiful, complex, worldly heroine, gives Meryl Streep the chance at bravura performance and she is, in a word, incandescent." Boston Globe film critic Michael Blowen wrote, "Pakula's literal adaptation of Styron's Sophie's Choice is an admirable, if reverential, movie that crams this triangle into a 2-1/2 hour character study enriched by Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, and nearly destroyed by Peter MacNicol." Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote that it "is, I think, an infuriatingly bad movie... 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. Eventually, we get to the Mystery—to Sophie's Choice—and discover that the incident is garish rather than illuminating, and too particular to demonstrate anything general."
The film won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and was nominated for Best Cinematography, Costume Design, Best Music, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
Streep's characterization was voted the third-greatest movie performance of all time by Premiere Magazine. The film was also ranked number one in Roger Ebert's Top Ten List for 1982, and was listed on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies.

Box office

The film grossed $202,131 in its opening weekend and went on to gross $30 million in the United States and Canada.

Awards and nominations

Academy Awards
BAFTA Awards
Golden Globe Awards
Writers Guild of America
Streep also made a clean sweep in the Best Actress categories at all major critics groups: National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Society of Film Critics and Boston Society of Film Critics