Sophie's choice is a movie that, when considering watching it for the first time, is daunting. If you know anything about the book or movie I would expect it to seem daunting for these three reasons: 1.) It's almost 3 hours long. 2.) It seems like it's one of those stuffy dramas that only uptight fancy-boy filmgoers will enjoy (I'm not implying homosexuality here, just the artsy types, you know, those types), and 3.) It's a real bummer of a film. While I cannot deny that the length of the film is quite long, the other claims(which of course I just made up. Take that straw man!), were negated by what happened when I actually watched the film.
The movie was not the slow paced melodrama I expected, but rather an lively coming of age tale about love, loving life and, what always follows, death. That description makes this movie sound like Garden State, and it is surely not Garden State. Had the plot been conceived today, it would be easy to take it as a rebuttal to the traditional indie flick. Rather than starting with a character who is bored with life and looking to die, early in the movie Sophie and her lover seem to be happy and in love. Rather than learning to love and live, the characters in Sophie's Choice learn that these things are exactly what they can no longer do. Perhaps now I'm describing the difference between a comedy and a tragedy, but there are three main characters in Sophie's Choice, and even while two of its characters hurtle toward an unhappy end, the third is coming into his adulthood, and it is through his lens that we view the entire story. If his story is the main one, then maybe Sophie's choice is more like an indie flick, and perhaps has the most in common with the birth mother of all indies, Harold and Maude. Both movies interweave their dramatic stories with laughter, and there is so much joy in parts of each that when the tragic parts are revealed, the sadness that comes with them is felt more deeply.
The performances as well as the story quickly earn goodwill towards the characters, and that goodwill is used to add weight to Sophie's story of her time in a concentration camp. What, perhaps stupidly, I didn't see until the end, was that each of the moments both in the past and present was a series of choices made by each of the characters sending them down their different paths. Each of these choices, whether they are the seemingly insignificant ones of moving into a pink apartment, or the large ones of choosing which child you love more, affect us in ways we cannot predict. For Sophie and Nathan, her lover, they have, by some combination of fate and choice, been led to such a place that they cannot bear to remember themselves. The cheeriness they have at the beginning is not what we are originally led to believe. Their cheer is a mixture of drugs, alcohol and most importantly, their over emotional, over dramatic love for each other. Every fight, every fuck is a chance for them to forget the choices they made which brought them to every moment.
It's terrifying to ponder that we constantly make these choices, and slowly our destinies are written out. Each choice is made by what we believe to be the best decision, but oftentimes it is not. Sophie, as she is waiting outside of Auschwitz is harassed by a German officer. She remains silent, and so he walks away. As he is leaving, she thinks she sees an opportunity for her to be freed, so she calls out to him in an attempt to charm him. What the sadistic officer gives her is not a chance to live, but rather a choice between sacrificing one child or the other. Colloquially, Sophie's Choice refers to the second decision she has to make. It means an impossible choice that must be made. What, perhaps it should refer to is the decision to call back the officer. It was not entirely bad luck and ill fate that made her choose between her children, but that moment when she called back the officer, that put her in that position. It's a sad fact that each day we stumble through thousands of choices, and each day we hope they work out in our favor. Still, no matter how well thought through a choice is, it always might end up being a poor decision which causes you to walk right into an impossible choice.
But what separates this movie from perhaps any other film is how much weight falls upon Meryl Streep, and how well she handles it. There have been many great performances in the history of movies. Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia comes to mind first, but I don't think I've ever seen a movie where my opinion of it would change so much without the addition of a single actor. Lawrence of Arabia might not be as good of a movie without Peter O'Toole, but I think I would still enjoy watching it. I'm almost certain that without Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice would whither and die. Her accent and difficulties speaking English seem perfectly natural, as does every emotion she feels throughout the film, and she goes through an extensive range of emotions. Her expressions allow us to understand why she loves a sometimes abusive schizophrenic man, and take us past the dialogue into understanding each of the decisions she makes that lead her to her fate.
Acting is a thing that a movie can harness in a way no other medium can. In plays it is impossible for an actor to pull off a perfect performance, but because of the ability to shoot and re-shoot scenes of a movie, the meticulousness of the actors and directors can come through in a way unlike any other format. Silent movies perhaps prove this more than any other. Look at Buster Keaton's facial expressions during any of his movies. He has a determined, strong expression which dares anyone, or anything to get between him and his goal. The expression tells us more about the character than any of the brief dialogue. Pulling that off in a play isn't possible. A play requires exaggerated gestures because the audience is further away than in film. In this post and the last, i suppose what I've been driving at is that cameras in film allow for an intimacy with the actors and the characters that cannot be replicated by a play. I'm not attempting to say that movies are superior than plays, but I am trying to explain how movies are able to explore humanity in ways that plays cannot, and explain to myself what I am even looking for in a movie that would make me call it great.
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