Sophie's Choice: Death, Life and all the Joyous Humping in Between
Written: Jun 28 '02 (Updated Jun 28 '02)
Product Rating:
Pros: Pakula's direction; Almendros' cinematography; Hamlisch's tender score; and the tour-de-force Kline, Streep and MacNicol
Cons: Slightly too long
The Bottom Line: Like looking at the Holocaust in a rear-view mirror: Some objects may be closer than they appear. This is powerful storytelling in the hands of a great storyteller.
When Alan J. Pakula died on November 19, 1998 in a freak auto accident (the car in front of him hit a piece of metal in the road, which then flew up and smashed through Pakula’s windshield), the film world lost one of its great storytellers. The director was one of those rare artists behind the camera who go about their work quietly, unobtrusively.
Klute.
The Parallax View.
All the President’s Men.
Comes a Horseman.
These are movies which continue to resonate because of their determination to connect a compelling narrative with an audience.
There was never anything flashy about a Pakula film. No odd camera angles, no twist endings, no slow-mo bullet ballets, no frame of celluloid stamped with a distinctive “look at what I can do with a film school degree” style. Like Sidney Lumet, George Stevens and William Wyler, Pakula was a writer’s director.
How fortunate that in 1982 Pakula was wedded with one of America’s great literary storytellers, William Styron. The result: Sophie’s Choice. Ask anyone who saw the movie in theaters 20 years ago and I’ll be willing to bet that, apart from the screen-burning performances by Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep, the thing they’ll remember most is the story—and not just specific bits of scenes here and there, but the whole, powerful arc of the story. Pakula knew he wanted to film Styron’s novel even before it was printed; after reading publishing galleys, he was convinced he needed to bring the story of Holocaust survivor Sophie Zawistowska to the screen.
After assembling the perfect cast (including the then-unknown Kline who was appearing in Broadway’s The Pirates of Penzance and Ally McBeal’s Peter MacNicol who had one film credit—the previous year’s Dragonslayer), Pakula patiently set about bringing us the story of doomed lovers and the young naive Southern boy who watches them self-destruct.
We’re introduced to Sophie (Streep) and Nathan (Kline) through the eyes of Virginia-tongued Stingo (MacNicol) who arrives in Brooklyn in 1947 looking for a cheap apartment where he can finish writing the semi-autobiographical novel burning inside him. “Call me Stingo,” he says, opening the movie—and certainly he’ll be our Ishmaelish guide through post-war New York as we meet first Nathan, whose bulging eyes and flecks of spittle contain all the madness of an Ahab; and then Sophie, pale as a whale squirming in her lover’s grip. If anything, however, this is Moby Dickafter the chase. Nathan has captured his prey and now the couple embarks on an I-love-you-no-I-hate-you rollercoaster course. Stingo (and the viewer) is there for the ride, providing comic relief as he stumbles and stutters in the face of Sophie and Nathan’s hurricane-force passion.
As he rides the train into New York, embarking on his voyage of discovery, Stingo stares absently out the window while, in the seat beside him, a sailor and his girlfriend make out. In this first shot, and the accompanying narration, Pakula sets the stage for the entire movie: “I wanted beyond hope or dreaming to be a writer, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and a stranger to death.”
Stingo gets a room in what must be the most distinctive building in all of Brooklyn—a shocking-pink Victorian-style house which houses several other tenants, but the only two Pakula and Styron care about are Sophie and Nathan—the Auschwitz survivor and the Harvard-educated biologist. They’re one of those arty, flamboyant couples you only find in the movies. Every time they speak, the volume is turned to 11. Stingo’s first introduction to them is the calling card they leave wedged in his door: a book of poetry by Walt Whitman. Poetry forms the architecture of Nathan and Sophie’s love affair—especially verse by Emily “Because I could not stop for Death” Dickinson. The next howdy-do is the sound of them making love upstairs—loud chandelier-rattling sex (or, as Pakula puts it, “joyous humping”).
Sophie’s Choice is, essentially, about how joyous humping keeps death at bay. As we learn more about the enigmatic couple, we see how each has secrets bottled up inside, troublesome darkness which can only be exorcised through copulation. This is the world that Stingo—horny, wide-eyed Stingo—is drawn in to. Like the coming-of-age protagonists in movies like Summer of ’42 and Brighton Beach Memoirs, he is our voyeur peeping into the bedrooms of older lovers. Unlike, respectively, Gary Grimes and Jonathan Silverman, MacNicol creates a character who is more sensitive, more self-aware of his longings. To him, sex—especially sex with Sophie—is much more than a notch on the stick of experience; it is the opportunity to joyously hump his way into a new post-war era, unleashing his muse which will someday inspire him to write novels like The Confessions of Nat Turner and Lie Down in Darkness. Yes, it’s no secret that Stingo is a thinly-disguised Styron.
He is also our surrogate in the lopsided love triangle in that salmon-pink boarding house. Through him we fall equally in love with the pale, radiant Sophie and the dark, manic Nathan—who, Stingo says with breathless awe, “was utterly, fatally fabulous.” Nathan burns bright and fast, breaking the bones of life then greedily sucking out the marrow. One of Kline’s best moments is when Stingo and Sophie come up behind him as he’s standing in the middle of the room, sweaty and stripped down to a white T-shirt, furiously directing the finale of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Notice how Pakula sets up the shot so that Nathan is reflected in every pane of glass in the room. By this time, his character is becoming equally fragmented.
Sophie, by contrast, is haunted by the fresh ghosts of Auschwitz and the terrible decision she was forced to make there. Without giving anything away, I can tell you the film’s pivotal moment—when she must make her “choice” in a Nazi concentration camp—encapsulates the awful agony of the Holocaust and the gut-punch of that moment is so well done by Streep that it transcends acting and becomes being.
Stingo desperately tries to penetrate Sophie’s shell. “Sophie, I want to understand, he says. “I want you to tell me the truth.”
Sophie sighs, shakes her head: “The truth doesn’t make it any easier to understand.”
But understand we must. Pakula’s whole intent lies in understanding who Sophie and Nathan were, and how they came to embody both the darkness and sunlight of post-war America.
The movie is interrupted by a series of flashbacks—all told from Sophie’s perspective—which gradually provide clues about the couple. They first met when Sophie—newly immigrated to America after her release from the concentration camp—collapses in a library. Nathan rushes to her side and is just in time to catch her vomit in his hand. “I think I’m going to die,” she whispers to him. Enraptured by her exotic beauty, Nathan refuses to let her die and nurses her back to health—along the way, teaching her the joys of Emily Dickinson and the kind of sex which puts roses back in her cheeks.
The other flashbacks are more haunting—filmed by the late great Nestor Almendros in a cold gray-blue—as Sophie takes us back to her death-camp experience, narrating to Stingo the story of how she found a way to survive. Here, in one shot (you’ll know it when you see it), Pakula and Almendros expertly capture the indescribable wrongness of the Holocaust: in the economy of a single movement, the camera follows Sophie stumbling through the bleak mud of the camp as she follows a prison guard past barracks full of doomed-to-die Jews; Sophie and the guard pass through a door, then the camera rises over the barbed-wire wall to reveal a beautiful, sunny garden belonging to the camp commandant. In that one instant, we’re taken from death to life—though, in reality, life on the German side of the wall is no life at all.
At some point, Pakula allows the film to get away from him—whether it’s in the flashbacks or not, I can’t really say—and the running time starts to outbalance the story. It is perhaps the movie’s single flaw, but it doesn’t detract from the overall effect of Pakula’s cinematic narrative. Yes, it’s long, but Sophie’s Choice does a marvelous job of giving us a beginning, a middle and an end—with plenty of joyous humping in between. This, then, is the way stories are supposed to be told to us sitting out there in the dark theater.
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