I finally saw: Sophie's Choice

Is there a movie out there with more of a discrepancy between the number of people who know what it's about, and the number of people who have actually seen it, than Sophie's Choice?

I was one of those former until yesterday, when I finally watched a movie I had started nearly a decade ago and never finished because it was due back at the library or some such (as discussed here).

I suppose you could make the argument for something like The Human Centipede, but let's stick to movies you can talk about in polite company.

Everyone knows that Sophie's Choice, the Alan J. Pakula film adapted from the William Styron novel, is about a woman (Meryl Streep) who has to make a choice about which one of her children, a son and a daughter, will live, and which one will die. The phrase "Sophie's choice" comes up in all kinds of contexts in popular writing and entertainment, and I suspect very few people of a certain age have to ask what it means. The percentage drops on people who know the scenario in which the choice was made (the Holocaust) or which child she chooses (her son), but those details are fairly unimportant in terms of appreciating the horrible, impossible choice Sophie had to make, and the effect it would have had on her. (Interestingly, even though sending one of your own children to the gas chamber is no laughing matter, I hear the phrase referenced most often in a humorous context, as the person using it tends to be exaggerating the importance of a decision between two frivolous options.)

Given what I knew about Sophie's Choice -- which was everything except which child she chooses -- I was surprised to find that 80% of this movie is not a Holocaust drama, but a Tennessee Williams play.

I expected most of the on-screen action to be leading up to the choice, with the choice foreshadowed throughout. From my aborted viewing a decade ago, I knew that the movie started in America in quite a different setting than I had initially expected, but I didn't figure it would stay there long before transitioning into flashback.

In fact, you don't know until the 88-minute mark that Sophie even had children, and then not until the 137-minute mark that she had to make a choice between them. Leaving only 14 minutes of screen time for the choice to sink in with the viewer before the movie is over.

If Sophie's Choice had been made today, I'd venture the script would start on the scene of her being confronted with the choice, but not on her making it. Then we'd transition to post-war Brooklyn and her relationship with Nathan (Kevin Kline) and with her neighbor, the narrator and would-be novelist Stingo (Peter MacNicol). Then intersperse little flashes of Sophie fretting over her choice before finally revealing it at the end. That's not to say this would be better, but it would front load the conflict in a way that seems advantageous nowadays, as well as create emotional stakes by introducing us to the children earlier (rather than basically not at all).

Instead, most of Pakula's film of Styron's story reminded me of two other literary greats. One of those is the aforementioned Williams, whose fondness for southern hothouse environments is recreated here, even with the action taking place in Brooklyn. Stingo is a southerner and the relationship between Nathan and Stophie seems to be very Stanley Kowalski-Blanche DuBois. The third wheel here is not Stella but Stingo, and this is where the other literary reference comes in. As Stingo is an observer but not an essential participant in the relationship between Nathan and Sophie, he reminded me of another narrating observer of a New York couple, Nick Carraway watching Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Stingo does become more involved as the story progresses, functioning at first as a harmless source of jealousy to the combustible Nathan, and then ultimately a legitimate rival. Given the attention to the present-day, New York portion of the story at the expense of the portion set in Auschwitz, you'd be justified in wondering if the "choice" referred to in the title was between Nathan and Stingo rather than her two children. And while I suppose that double meaning is there, surely that's not what Pakula or Styron intended.

Still, the placing of her fateful choice within the narrative leaves it almost as a footnote, which is odd indeed. The speed with which she has to make the choice -- she's given less than 30 seconds -- was also a surprise to me, as I figured she had time to make a list of pros and cons for each kid, that type of thing.

Clearly it contextualizes what we know about her, and that's something, but the film itself doesn't really pause to consider it, to the extent that Stingo is controlling the direction of the narrative by serving as its narrator (actual narration provided by Josef Summer). After Sophie has revealed her secret to Stingo, his only reaction is carnal, as he transitions a session of comforting her into sex. It's not only his actions but his words that we have as evidence of this, as he begins narrating about the power of his lust, without even mentioning what she's just told him. Maybe Stingo is, in fact, the shallow hack Nathan accuses him of being.

The performance that won Streep her second Oscar (and kicked off her 30-year Oscar drought) is astonishing, as she masters the Polish accent (one of my son's friends has a Polish mum so I've been hearing it a lot lately). But the bigger pure revelation for me is Kline, who's giving a version of the larger-than-life character I fell in love with in A Fish Called Wanda, but with a menace I'm not sure I've ever seen from him. I truly never knew what he was going to do next and felt he could explode into violence at every second. There's a life and a deadness in his eyes that have a timeshare over the control of his persona.

Overall I was a pretty big fan of the movie, but it wasn't the least bit constructed as I expected it to be. I guess that's a good thing, given that films tend to surprise us less and less these days.