Independent Films, Film Profiles

Sophie's Choice (film)
by Alan_J._Pakula

Sophie's Choice is a 1982 American drama film that tells the story of a Polish immigrant, Sophie, and her tempestuous lover who share a boarding house with a young writer in Brooklyn. It stars Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Peter MacNicol. Alan J. Pakula directed the movie and wrote the script from a novel by William Styron, also called Sophie's Choice.This is widely regarded as Meryl Streep's finest performance, and it won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film was nominated for Best Cinematography (Néstor Almendros), Costume Design (Albert Wolsky), Best Music (Marvin Hamlisch), and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Alan J. Pakula).In 1947, the movie's narrator, Stingo (Peter MacNicol), a young writer from the American South, travels to post-World War II Brooklyn. He is befriended by Sophie Zawistowski (Streep), a beautiful Polish immigrant, and her lover, Nathan Landau (Kline). It is clear to Stingo from the serial number 111379 tattooed into Sophie's forearm that she is no stranger to pain. Nathan and Sophie are passionately in love, but these episodes of tender love are inexplicably intermixed with Nathan revealing a violent and almost crazed personality.One evening, Stingo talks with Sophie and learns some more about her past: that she was married but her husband and her father were killed in a German work camp. When Stingo notices scars on Sophie's wrists, Sophie explains that after being rescued from Auschwitz, she was taken to a refugee camp in Sweden, but while there she went to a church, broke a glass, and cut her wrists. Sophie goes into another room where Nathan spends a lot of his time and finds another wine bottle. The walls are covered in images of the Holocaust, prompting Sophie to explain that it is Nathan's obsession.Sophie and Nathan's relationship is endangered both by Sophie's ghosts and Nathan's obsession with the Holocaust, as well as his violent temper and increasingly apparent mental illness. 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 abuses and harasses her. Sophie stays with him, because he saved her when she first came over to the US, and because she thinks he would die without her. When Stingo visits a man who knew Sophie's father, he discovers she's been lying to him. He learns that Sophie's father, a Polish college professor, hated Jews. Later, when Stingo talks to Sophie about this, she explains, with more about her past emerging through a series of harrowing flashbacks.Sophie reveals that in the winter of 1938, her father was working on a speech he called "Poland's Jewish Problem." In a flashback, Sophie listens to a recording of a man speaking in both German and Polish while she is typing a speech for her father. While typing, she hears a word repeated several times that she has never heard before. She goes back a bit, and hears the voice say that the solution for "Poland's Jewish Problem" is "extermination."Sophie later goes to the Jewish ghetto, where she spends ages watching all the people her father has condemned to die. She suddenly remembers that her father is waiting for his speech and hurries home to finish the typing. In her haste, Sophie makes a lot of mistakes and hurries to university. Her father reads the speech in front of a large crowd of people and becomes very angry.Later, Sophie has a lover, Józef, who lives with his half-sister, Wanda, a leader in the Resistance. Wanda tries to convince Sophie to translate some stolen Gestapo documents, but fearing she may endanger her children, she declines. Two weeks later, Józef is murdered by the Gestapo, and a short time later Sophie, after Sophie buys a ham on the black market for her dying mother, is arrested and sent to Auschwitz with her children. Upon arrival, the Germans force her to decide which of her children will live and which will die. Jan, Sophie's son, is sent to the children's camp, and her daughter, Eva, is sent to her death in Crematorium Two.Sophie later learns of an epidemic in the children's camp, and becomes concerned for her son's well-being. She convinces the Commandant to let him into the Lebensborn programme. He relents and tells Sophie she will see him the next day. However, the Commandant breaks his promise about letting Sophie see her son. She never found out what happened to him.Back in the present, Stingo receives a phone call from Nathan's brother, asking for a meeting. Stingo learns that Nathan has been mentally ill since childhood, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and has been hospitalized many times throughout his life. Nathan has hidden the truth about his illness, his occupation, and education from Sophie. Nathan's brother asks Stingo to keep an eye on Nathan because he is concerned with Nathan's hidden drug use.Nathan asks Sophie to marry him and she accepts. Stingo feels betrayed, as he is falling in love with Sophie, but agrees to be Nathan's best man. When Nathan goes into another of his violent moods, Sophie runs to Stingo. At this point, Nathan makes a threatening phone call which ends with Nathan making more threats and with the sound of a gun firing.Stingo and Sophie flee and check into a hotel. Stingo insists that they start a family, but Sophie has yet to tell him her final secret - her choice. She recounts the night she arrived at Auschwitz with her children, and of how a Nazi officer forced her to choose life for one child, and death for the other.Despite her plea of "Don't make me choose. I can't choose," Sophie's words fall on deaf ears. When a young Nazi is told to take both children away, she releases her daughter, shouting "Take my little girl!" Sophie can only watch, her guilt and despair all too clear, as the screaming little girl is carried away to die. Once she has told him, Sophie asks Stingo not to talk about marriage and children, because of her harrowing past, and because she believes that she would be an unfit and cruel mother, as at the last moment she chose between her children.They sleep together that night, but Stingo wakes up alone. Sophie has left him a note, saying she has gone back to Nathan, but that he is a great lover. She does not think that she deserves Stingo, and that she has to be with a dangerous man as punishment for her horrible past. Stingo later goes back to the building where he met Sophie and Nathan, only to find everybody in a state of shock. Stingo is led up to Sophie and Nathan's room, where he finds they have committed suicide by cyanide poisoning. Picking up Nathan's book of Emily Dickinson poems, Stingo recites "Ample Make This Bed," as if he were delivering a eulogy at a funeral, over them as they lay dead, holding each other on the bed.The film ends with Stingo leaving Brooklyn, the screen going misty, and an image of Sophie's face fading into view.