Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice (1982) is adapted from William Styron's novel, and its title is now an idiom: a decision with no solution, where every option is a loss. Brooklyn, 1947. A young writer named Stingo moves into a boarding house and gets to know the couple upstairs: Sophie, who is Polish, and her American lover Nathan. Sophie survived Auschwitz. Nathan is brilliant, exuberant and unstable. The three of them build a close and increasingly dangerous arrangement. The weight of the film sits in the flashbacks. Each time Sophie explains how she survived, the story shifts slightly, and the truth is held back until the end. Meryl Streep learned Polish and German for the part. She plays most of the Polish sections in Polish and speaks her English with a Polish accent. She went to Pakula herself to get the role; he had someone else in mind. The choice of the title is a single scene near the end. Streep won Best Actress for it, and that scene occupies its own place in the history of screen performance. It runs 151 minutes. Good for: literary adaptation, performance driven films, and post Holocaust narratives. Less good for: the subject is heavy and includes suicide and mental illness. That scene is genuinely devastating.