Oscarstravaganza: Sophie's Choice

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Winner: Best Actress, 1982
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Starring: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol

Meryl Streep. The name just exudes excellence, doesn’t it? She now has 16 Oscar nominations under her belt, though it’s been 27 years since she actually won. That win came for Sophie’s Choice and however you feel about some of the performances for which she’s been nominated, you’d have a hard time making a case against that one. It’s a great performance and a great film.

Adapted from the novel by William Styron, Sophie’s Choice is constructed to tell its story via two narrators. The first is Stingo (Peter MacNicol), the exterior narrator who many years after the fact relates to us the story of how he came to know Sophie (Meryl Streep) and Nathan (Kevin Kline). The interior narrator is Sophie, who tells Stingo about her complicated and horrific past. They meet a few years after the close of World War II, when Stingo comes to New York in order to write his novel and moves into a rooming house where Sophie and Nathan occupy the upstairs rooms. He is immediately fascinated by them, by their obvious dysfunction (the first time he encounters them they’re having a knockdown, drag out fight) and their sad, peculiar glamour. Nathan in particular is like a character from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, armed with a terrible, cutting wit, a keen intelligence and demons hidden close to the surface. Sometimes he is friendliness personified, other times he is a loose cannon who fires at will on both Sophie and Stingo.

In the midst of Nathan’s tumultuous moods Sophie and Stingo grow closer. He falls deeply in love with her but her ties to Nathan are too tight and her history is far too complicated for Stingo to ever be able to handle. He knows from the start that she spent time in a concentration camp, not for being Jewish but for being Polish and, he’s told, because her father and husband vocally opposed the Nazis. He learns later that this is a lie, that her father was actually a proud anti-Semite and supporter of the Nazis who was killed despite his views for being a member of the Polish intelligentsia. He also learns the story’s most famous plot point, that on her arrival at the camp Sophie was forced to choose between her son and daughter, condemning one immediately to death.

The title is something of a misnomer in that it is not just one choice that defines Sophie but many. Obviously there is the choice between her children from which psychologically and emotionally she never recovers. There is also the choice she makes in how she deals with her father’s legacy during and after the war. After Stingo discovers the truth Sophie admits to him that far from admiring her father, she despised him and his ideas. Nevertheless, once she is in the camp she attempts to use his legacy as leverage to get released, pleading her case to the Commandant and claiming to agree with Nazi policies towards the Jews. She chooses to set aside her morality in a desperate attempt at self-preservation, just as before going to the camp she chooses not to help the resistance fighters who ask for her help, just as she chooses to attempt to smuggle food to her sick mother – the crime that results in her and her children being sent to the camp in the first place. Finally, there is also the choice she makes to stay with Nathan despite the fact that he is on an obvious and quick path to destruction.

Streep’s performance as Sophie is a thing of carefully crafted and executed beauty. She is someone who has endured much and, in certain ways, is very detached. The person she is in New York is a creation, a person she has invented in order to distance herself from the pain of her past – it’s an understandable impulse but it also makes her hard to pin down. Our ideas about her change with each revelation and her story changes so much we have to wonder how much is true and what elements have been tweaked to preserve some shred of the image she wants to project. There is a sense about her that she has emotionally checked out of life and is just waiting for her body to follow suit, which can’t happen as long as Nathan is there and needs her. He is such a fragile character but also so vibrant, the sun around which the other characters orbit. Kline plays the role perfectly, giving Nathan enough humanity and charm that you can understand why it is that the people in his life continue to come back even after he blows up at them, picking away at them as brutally as he can. As the wide-eyed but quickly maturing Stingo, MacNicol also turns in a strong performance that helps keep the story grounded and on track. The film is really an actors’ showcase and the three main actors complement each other well. The other elements of the film are also strong, allowing it to maintain the narrative power that it would have had when it was first released and remain an excellent piece of work.

Oscarstravaganza: All The President's Men

* * * *

Winner: Best Sound, 1976
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Starring: Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards

Every once in a while I see a film that makes me understand why people often say that they miss the days when movies were made for adults. All The President's Men, based on the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, is a movie for adults, one that doesn't punctuate it's story with violence or sex, but relies solely on its ability to engage with the audience on an intellectual level. It's a refreshing movie - even 34 years later.

The film is kicked off with the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Washington Post reporter Woodward (Robert Redford) is sent to court to cover the arraignment of the five men arrested at Watergate and quickly comes to believe that there's something bigger going on. His colleague Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) also thinks that something is being covered up and manages to get himself on the story as well. There is tension between the two men at first, stemming largely from Bernstein's unsolicited help in punching up Woodward's copy, but they quickly learn to work together and their styles end up balancing each other out. Woodward's ability to finesse and Bernstein's ability to get to people who are reluctant to see him (he is nothing if not tenacious and just a little bit sneaky) are both valuable assets that pay off big time.

For a while the story seems to be going nowhere. Their boss, Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards), threatens to kill it unless they can put the disparate elements they've gathered together into a cohesive narrative, others argue that they don't have the experience to cover it, and many seem to think that there's no story at all. The Post is dangerously close to becoming a joke in journalistic circles, which in turn prompts Bradlee to dig in his heels, standing behind his reporters even as he worries that they might not be able to pull it off and show the government's level of involvement in the scandal. Woodward and Bernstein persist, putting the pieces together with the help of Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), and writing a story that would forever change the face of American politics.

The end results of Watergate are well known and the film itself doesn't really dwell on the consequences of the story. Instead it focuses on how the story is put together and manages to construct itself in a way that is exciting even when things aren't really moving forward. Woodward and Bernstein spend a lot of time chasing down false leads, getting doors slammed in their faces, and being given the run-around over the phone, but director Alan J. Pakula is able to convey these scenes in an energetic way that builds momentum, which can't have been easy. All The President's Men is made up almost entirely of people doing little more than talking but it's more thrilling than most movies that rely on explosions and car chases as crutches. The screenplay by William Goldman won an Oscar and it's easy to understand why - the script is so solid that it really becomes the star of the show.

All told, All The President's Men was nominated for 8 Oscars and won 4, for Sound, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, and Supporting Actor for Jason Robards. Surprisingly, neither Redford nor Hoffman made the cut as Best Actor, though the field was admittedly a bit crowded that year (the winner was Peter Finch for Network, the other four nominees were William Holden for Network, Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver, Giancarlo Giannini for Seven Beauties, and Sylvester Stallone for Rocky). It's perhaps because it's difficult to think of Woodward and Bernstein as separate people rather than a team (throughout the film they're referred as "Woodstein"), which is really a credit to how well Redford and Hoffman work together. They make a believable team and play their characters as men who have their differences but aren't defined by stylistic quirks. Redford and Hoffman have both had rich careers full of great performances and their performances in All The President's Men are right up their amongst their best.