Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice Information

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. The film 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.

Meryl Streep's performance was very favorably received, 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).

The studio behind the film was the British company ITC Entertainment, presided over (until late 1981) by Lord Grade, who was influential in bringing the novel to the big screen.

Plot

In 1947, the movie's narrator, Stingo (Peter MacNicol), relocates to Brooklyn in order to write a novel and is befriended by Sophie Zawistowski (Meryl Streep), a Polish immigrant, and her lover, Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline).

One evening, Stingo learns from Sophie that she was married but her husband and her father were killed in a German work camp and that she was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

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. There is a flashback showing Nathan rescuing Sophie from near death from anemia shortly after her immigration to the U.S.

Sophie (a Polish Catholic) eventually reveals that her father was a Nazi sympathizer. Sophie had a lover, Józef (Neddim Prohic), who lived with his half-sister, Wanda (Katharina Thalbach), 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 the research he is doing at a pharmaceutical company is so groundbreaking that he will win the Nobel Prize.

At a meeting with Nathan's physician brother, Stingo learns that Nathan is mentally ill (paranoid schizophrenic) and that all of the schools that Nathan had attended were "expensive funny farms." (He has a job in the library of a pharmaceutical firm, which his brother got for him, and only occasionally assists with research.)

After Nathan discharges a firearm over the telephone in a violent rage, Sophie and Stingo flee to a hotel. She reveals to him the tragic choice she was forced to make at Auschwitz. Upon arrival, 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 (Adrian Kaltika), to be sent to the children's camp, and her daughter, Eva (Jennifer Lawn), to be sent to her death in Crematorium Two.

Sophie and Stingo make love, but while Stingo is sleeping, Sophie, tormented by her memory, 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 Sophie was fond of reading.

Stingo moves away from Brooklyn to a small farm his father recently inherited in southern Virginia to finish writing his novel.

Cast

Meryl Streep as Zofia "Sophie" Zawistowska
Kevin Kline as Nathan Landau
Peter MacNicol as Stingo
Rita Karin as Yetta Zimmerman
Stephen D. Newman as Larry Landau
Josh Mostel as Morris Fink
Marcell Rosenblatt as Astrid Weinstein
Moishe Rosenfeld as Moishe Rosenblum
Robin Bartlett as Lillian Grossman
Eugene Lipinski as Polish professor
John Rothman as Librarian
Neddim Prohic as Jòzef
Katharina Thalbach as Wanda
Jennifer Lawn as Eva Zawistowski
Adrian Kalitka as Jan Zawistowski
Joseph Leon as Dr. Blackstock
David Wohl as English teacher
Vida Jerman as female SS guard
Josef Sommer as the Narrator (Stingo as an adult)

Casting notes

William Styron wrote the novel with Ursula Andress in mind for the part of Sophie, but Meryl Streep was very determined to get the role. After she obtained a bootlegged copy of the script, she went after Alan J. 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.

Streep filmed the "choice" scene in one take. Being a mother herself, she found shooting the scene extremely painful and emotionally draining and refused to do it again. Streep's characterization was voted the third greatest movie performance of all time by Premiere Magazine.

Reception

Sophie's Choice won the Academy Award for Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and 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). The film was also ranked #1 in the Roger Ebert's Top Ten List for 1982 and was listed on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition).

Awards and nominations

Academy Awards

Best Actress - Meryl Streep (won)
Best Cinematography - Nestor Almendros (nominated)
Best Costume Design - Albert Wolsky (nominated)
Best Original Score - Marvin Hamlisch (nominated)
Best Screenplay: Adapted - Pakula (nominated)

BAFTA Awards

Best Actress - Streep (nominated)
Most Outstanding Newcomer to Film - Kevin Kline (nominated)

Golden Globe Awards

Best Actress: Drama - Streep (won)
Best Film: Drama (nominated)
New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture: Male - Kline (nominated)

Writers Guild of America

Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium - Pakula (nominated)