Mike Guratza Yes, Meryl Streep can even play a transsexual-nigerian-goat. We get it. Yes Kevin Klein has got all the charm in the world, and deserved his Oscar for (The same role-pretty much) in "A Fish Called Wanda"Yes, the holocaust timeline is gripping.BUT WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THE REST OF THE MOVIE? It reminds me of "The Room" (Tommy Wiseau)Who let's a semi-retarded southern boy sleep in the same room with them from the first week they meet them?"Where do these stuff happen?No reality whatsoever. Oh, and pretty boring, tedious pace.

The_Film_Cricket t may surprise some to know that despite a thirty-five year career, seventeen Oscar nominations, fifty films and a reputation of being one of the best actors of her generation, Meryl Streep has been named Best Actress by the academy only twice. It first happened in 1983 with Sophie's Choice and it wouldn't happen again for 28 years when she won for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. I think Sophie's Choice is still her best. Not that her subsequent roles haven't been excellent, but it is within this sad melodrama that her best gifts are displayed.Her achievements, on the surface, come from the way she prepared for the role. Her legendary ability with accents began here as she gives Sophie a polish accent and plays the flashback sequences speaking Polish and German. But those are the technical achievements, what she is able to portray in Sophie Zawistowski is a woman who is happy, playful and sexy, but just under the surface suffers a thinly veiled level of pain. Around the edges of her lips, in the closed in lines around her eyes, we sense there is a buried horror in her past.We meet Sophie, a survivor of the death camps at Auschwitz, through the eyes of Stingo (Peter McNichol) a naive young kid from the south who has designs on being a great writer. This is 1947, in the years immediately following the war and he has moved north to Brooklyn, New York where he meets Sophie, a polish immigrant living with her lover, a brash older man named Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline). Sophie and Nathan become friends and their friendship gradually begins to break down the blinders of Stingo's adolescence. There's a level to Sophie that doesn't become immediately clear, but also doesn't reveal itself all at once. We learn that she was a polish-Catholic who was thrown into a concentration camp for trying to smuggle a ham. She lost both of her children in the camp and then survived the camps herself and immigrated to the United States.She has experienced a lifetime of hurt and pain, of loss and of sorrow, but she tries to soldier on in her life by trying to put it all behind her. Yet, erasing all of her memories won't make them go away, they still reside within her. Look at the way her makeup whitens her face, as if the experience has left her a ghost of her former self. Her voice is very sweet but her speech seems somewhat cautious as if telling stories about those experiences are too difficult to put into words. What I intuit from Sophie, whose present life has very few walls as she drinks and takes up with a lover, is that she spent so many years having to watch her step and keep herself within a small confined space that now she simply lives at will.In her former life, in the death camps, she had to watch every move, every syllable, every motion. One of the best observances in the film is during one of the flashbacks in which she and a fellow inmate use the Auschwitz Walk, walking through deep areas of mud but trying to only step in the footprints of the people who have gone before. Observe how that scene connects to later scenes in which she is carefree and dances at will but when she is frightened, her footsteps are very small.It may have seemed more rational to simply tell Sophie's story through Sophie's eyes without the narrative of Stingo's growth from callow youth to a young man who, and how this experience makes him a better writer. But I think we need that understanding to bring her story to the surface. What happens to Sophie in the end is only fitting because her life in the wake of the holocaust was more or less meaningless except in it's relation to Stingo's understanding of human nature. There's nothing left for her and finally, in the end, she has found some peace.

AaronCapenBanner Based on William Styron's novel, this Alan J. Pakula directed adaptation stars Meryl Streep as Sophie, a Polish refugee and concentration camp survivor haunted by those painful memories; Kevin Kline plays Nathan, a Jewish man who loves Sophie, and is obsessed with the Holocaust and emotionally erratic, veering from affectionate to combative; Peter MacNicol plays Stingo, a young American writer who befriends them both, and ultimately tells their story, as he acts as the film's narrator as the three of them share a boarding house, and Stingo will learn Sophie's terrible "choice" that has haunted her for years...Meryl Streep is magnificent in her Academy Award winning performance, portraying the haunted guilt and heartbreak of that impossible choice made many years ago. Nathan's craziness does grate on the viewer after awhile, and film is a bit long, but so powerfully acted and told that it is well worth seeing regardless of these quibbles.

Costas Papachristou The only bit of information about her on IMDb reads: "Attended Tulane University" (the field of study is not even hinted at...). Under her Filmography, there is only one title: "Sophie's Choice"... This is all that remains from a very impressive performance of 1982 by a little girl whose name was Jennifer Lawn. Those who first saw the famous "choice" scene toward the end of the film, where the Academy Award winner Meryl Streep was holding terrified little Jennifer in her arms, must have foreseen a bright future for this kid actress who might easily fool the viewers into believing that she was actually living the scene, rather than just acting it! "A future Oscar winner in the arms of a present one", one might have prophesied back in 1982. Unfortunately, this prophecy never came true... If you have seen the movie, you are certainly familiar with this intensely dramatic scene (DON'T watch it if you have NOT seen the film and plan to do so!): costas-music.blogspot.gr/2012/12/sophies-choice-choice-scene.html