The Tyranny Of Choice

Auschwitz, 1938. Inside a camp, rows of Jews walk zombie-like, feet heavy in mud, on a bleak, cloudy day. Sophie Zawistowska is in the crowd with her two children―Jan, 10, and Eva, 3. The camp commander’s roving gaze stops at her. He tells her she is very beautiful, her skin is flawless and her features, sharp. Sophie tells him she is not a Jew; she is a devout Catholic. He asks her if she is a Communist and she denies. Suddenly, the crazed commander’s gaze falls on the children. He orders a soldier to take them away to the gas chambers. Sophie is shocked, pleads with him to spare them to send them to the labour camp instead. The commander pauses for a second and then tells Sophie that she can make a choice—one of her children will be sent to the gas chamber and she can choose which child.

This scene is at the crux of Sophie’s Choice which comes towards the end of the film. Even after a couple of earlier viewings and after so long, the scene is still unbearable to watch. Meryl Streep as Sophie Zawistowska is extraordinary here, with a low, long cry emanating from her open mouth as the soldier snatches the little girl from Sophie and heads towards the gas chambers. Apparently, Streep refused to do a second take of this scene, saying she couldn’t go through the emotions again. She is also said to have hounded the filmmaker, Alan J Pakula, to get the role of Sophie, based on William Styron’s acclaimed book of the same name, as he was considering Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann because of her foreign appearance.

Streep transforms into Sophie from the very first scene, a Polish Christian living in a boarding house in Brooklyn in her boyfriend’s apartment, with her foreign accent and mannerisms. The story is told through Stingo (Peter MacNicol), a young aspiring writer from the South who has come to Brooklyn to have a go at his book―neighbour to Sophie and her boyfriend Nathan (Kevin Kline) in the same boarding house.

Sophie and Nathan have a tumultuous relationship. The first time Stingo meets them is when a visibly drunk Nathan is screaming at Sophie to leave the house. But soon the three of them become the best of friends, Sophie the foreigner with a troubled past trying to get accepted in New York (‘the Sodom of the North’ as Stingo’s father calls the city), Nathan the brilliant biologist on the brink of a major breakthrough in his research at the pharma firm Pfizer, and Stingo, as much a foreigner in New York as Sophie, trying to make it in the hallowed world of writers. They are a threesome, reminiscent of Jim, Jules and Catherine in Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, where coincidentally Jules is a biologist and Jim a budding writer. But here the chemistry between them is very different, the spark and spontaneity missing—there is a scene set at the Brooklyn Bridge but it’s nowhere like the celebrated ‘race across the bridge’ scene in Truffaut’s film. 

Sophie tells Stingo her story―during one of those nights when Nathan throws a fit and leaves the house―that her father was a great man, a professor at Krakow University who fought for the Jews and was a vocal opponent of the Nazis. So was her husband, who was also a professor in Poland. Both of them were taken by the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, one day, and that’s the last she saw of them. She escapes to the US, meets Nathan and they fall madly in love. She doesn’t mention anything about her children to Stingo.

The three of them become inseparable, despite Nathan’s mercurial moods. In one scene, Nathan in his dark, unstable avatar accuses Sophie and Stingo of sleeping together. Stingo will realise everything is not quite as it appears with both Sophie and Nathan. He learns from Nathan’s brother that he is a schizophrenic and has been undergoing treatment since he was 10. Nathan does work at Pfizer, but as a lowly library clerk, not in their cutting-edge research centre. William Styron had a long battle with mental depression about which he wrote viscerally in his book Darkness Visible.

Stingo also learns that Sophie’s father was a bigoted Nazi supporter, who wrote hate speeches against the Jews and in one of his celebrated speeches he declares the only way out of the Jewish problem was extermination. But the fact that the Gestapo took him is indeed true—the Nazis didn’t differentiate between sympathisers and opponents when they raided universities and rounded up academicians.

Nathan proposes to Sophie, he wants Stingo to be the best man. But by now it’s apparent their love story is doomed and it will all end badly. Stingo makes a last-ditch effort to save Sophie, whom he has quietly loved since their first meeting. But she can’t be saved. Sophie and Nathan die by suicide in their Brooklyn boarding house; they finally look at peace, in a tight embrace in their favourite bed, away from all the troubles of the world.

Meryl Streep won the Oscar for Best Actress for playing Sophie. It’s really her film, the range of emotions, the Polish accent, the quirks and mannerisms, she does all with aplomb. It’s incredible how Streep is still going strong—she is as delightful at 74 in the latest season of Only Murders in the Building. Kevin Kline with his bravura performance in his debut role announces that he is an actor who is going to stay. MacNicol can’t really do much with his character―he is always the outsider, the observer and the weakling. But on second viewing, the film doesn’t hold as a whole, the performances seem like solo acts in a play. They are great individually, but there doesn’t seem to be a genuine feeling between the characters, it seems theatrical and acted upon. There have been better films about Nazi Germany, the concentration camps and the inhumanness of the Holocaust.