I realize I will be in the minority but personally, I did not care for this film. Meryl Streep won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Sophie, a woman forced to make a gut wrenching decision in a concentration camp. Streep is not normally my favorite actress, though I did like her in Music of the Heart. I couldn't really decide here whether this was a superb portrayal of Sophie's devastating choice, or whether my judgment was clouded by all my past negative impressions of Streep tending to overact.
The story revolves around a Polish refugee, Sophie, who is haunted by past concentration camp experiences, in her modern relationship with a schizophrenic American Jew, Nathan, who is obsessed with the Holocaust and is abusive to her. The story is related by their mutual friend, Stingo, a Southern writer who has come to post war New York.
The flashback scenes to Sophie's Auschwitz days are unforgettable and her choice horrific, but in my opinion, her story would have been infinitely more powerful if the entire movie had been set back in Nazi Poland, where she served as Rudolh Hoess's secretary due to her fluency in German. I completely agree with a few others, who also find it's an effective one third of a movie, the concentration camp portion. Much of the film is boring, as we await the gripping climax.
I am a mother and certainly find Sophie's choice a haunting one but this movie not at all impressive. The only character of interest in the post war setting (the majority of the picture) is Sophie herself. It does indeed diminish Sophie's dramatic tale, that her woeful experiences (in fact, a living death) are placed on equal par with all the assorted psychological jumble of Nathan's admittedly sad (but apparently atypical) paranoid schizophrenia and, worse, the mindless tittle tattle of Stingo's love & sex life.
The story revolves around a Polish refugee, Sophie, who is haunted by past concentration camp experiences, in her modern relationship with a schizophrenic American Jew, Nathan, who is obsessed with the Holocaust and is abusive to her. The story is related by their mutual friend, Stingo, a Southern writer who has come to post war New York.
The flashback scenes to Sophie's Auschwitz days are unforgettable and her choice horrific, but in my opinion, her story would have been infinitely more powerful if the entire movie had been set back in Nazi Poland, where she served as Rudolh Hoess's secretary due to her fluency in German. I completely agree with a few others, who also find it's an effective one third of a movie, the concentration camp portion. Much of the film is boring, as we await the gripping climax.
I am a mother and certainly find Sophie's choice a haunting one but this movie not at all impressive. The only character of interest in the post war setting (the majority of the picture) is Sophie herself. It does indeed diminish Sophie's dramatic tale, that her woeful experiences (in fact, a living death) are placed on equal par with all the assorted psychological jumble of Nathan's admittedly sad (but apparently atypical) paranoid schizophrenia and, worse, the mindless tittle tattle of Stingo's love & sex life.