Sophie’s Choice
Alan J Pakula (1982)
The reader of William Styron’s 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice is asked to endure three grim stories. First, the concentration camp memories of Sophie Zawistowska, an Auschwitz survivor; second, the tale of Sophie’s death-bound partnership with Nathan Landau, a paranoid schizophrenic, in post-war Brooklyn; last and – in terms of wordage – by no means least, the sentimental and sexual education of the book’s narrator, Stingo, a young Southerner come to New York to make his name as a writer. During the summer of 1947, when all three are tenants in a Brooklyn boarding house they call the Pink Palace, Stingo falls in love, in different ways, with both Sophie, the beautiful Polish immigrant, and Nathan, the well-read, charismatic Jewish-Yankee. My paperback copy of Sophie’s Choice runs to 684 pages and Styron’s novel is in all respects distended. The narrative structure is persistently unwieldy. Sophie’s recollections, in conversation with Stingo, of her comfortable life in Cracow in the 1930s, of Auschwitz, and of the early days of her relationship with Nathan are transmitted by Styron sometimes in first-person direct speech and sometimes as a third-person account, filtered by Stingo. The latter includes many details which are implausible as things that Sophie, for all that Stingo becomes her confidant, actually told him. The plotting is clumsily contrived. The serial improbabilities are never rooted in character: they’re always the awkward manoeuvrings of an author wrenching the material into a storyline that delays revelations of the truth about Sophie and Nathan, and continuing to up the tortured, melodramatic ante. Worse still are the events – mostly non-events – around Stingo’s attempts to lose his virginity. The descriptions of these are remarkable both for their explicitness and their boringness; the prose is a queasy combination of profanity and orotundity. The overwriting that is a feature of the novel as a whole is just as present in the verbose, leaden humour of the sexual coming-of-age episodes as in the ‘deep’ passages describing Sophie’s and Nathan’s death-in-life.
Perhaps the Stingo sex bits are meant as comic relief but giving them, in effect, the same amount of coverage as the Sophie-Nathan elements is an example of the novel’s tastelessness – even if Styron’s treatment of the relationship between Sophie and Nathan is more seriously offensive. (I’m not lamenting being short-changed on the death camps and mental illness – I wanted much less of everything.) Sophie was raised in a middle-class Catholic family; her father was a university professor. She’s oppressed by the persisting awareness of how she lived through Auschwitz and by its legacy of guilt. She now finds herself regularly abused, verbally but sometimes physically too, by a Jewish man, who repeatedly demands an explanation of how shiksa Sophie survived the death camps in which so many Jews perished. Styron’s story is distinctive because the protagonists aren’t what you’d expect in this literary territory: Sophie has a number tattooed on her arm but she isn’t a typical Nazi victim; Nathan, obsessed with the Holocaust and what the Nazis did to his fellow Jews, maltreats a death camp survivor because she’s a Gentile. Nathan keeps breaking off then resuming their relationship; Sophie finds him increasingly impossible to live with but can’t live without him; they eventually commit suicide together. (The day Stingo arrives at the Pink Palace, he hears Nathan ask his lover the anguished question ‘Why can’t you see, Sophie – we are dying?’)
William Styron implies strongly (to put it mildly) that the pair’s fatal liaison speaks of something fundamental about the psychological and emotional injuries inflicted on people on the receiving end – however differently – of what the Nazis did. Once the nature and history of Nathan’s illness are revealed, however, this is exposed as a monstrous ploy on Styron’s part. How can Nathan represent Jewish perceptions of the Holocaust? He is, in the words of his elder brother, Larry, ‘quite mad’ (and Nathan’s schizophrenia was diagnosed when he was a child, well before Nazism was into its genocidal stride). Styron encourages the reader to wonder too if Sophie’s guilt about her past has drawn her to someone who punishes her in the way that she feels she deserves. This too is a cheat. Larry Landau makes clear to Stingo that Sophie knows nothing of Nathan’s illness. His behaviour is, from her point of view, bewilderingly volatile. It’s hard to see, therefore, how Sophie can masochistically rely on Nathan to make her pay for what she did in, and en route to, Auschwitz.
The viewer of Alan Pakula’s screen adaptation of Sophie’s Choice has a better time than the reader of the novel. The film is dignified by Meryl Streep’s rightly celebrated portrait of Sophie, Peter MacNicol’s admirably alert playing of Stingo, and Marvin Hamlisch’s lovely, affecting score. The middle-aged Stingo’s retrospective narration (read in voiceover by Josef Sommer) is minimal. The sexual aspect of Stingo’s summer-I-became-a-man is very considerably pared down (although what remains still grates). Pakula’s screenplay is often skilful and judicious. Yet the movie is hamstrung by his respect for Styron; as a result, the thoroughgoing defects of the original are also those of the film. Pakula consistently emulates the novel’s lack of momentum and some of his compressions of the narrative, although they might read well on paper, don’t play. The flashback episode to Sophie’s time in the household of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Günther Maria Halmer) is especially shaky and one bit of this in particular makes no dramatic sense. Sophie overhears a conversation between Höss and another SS officer but she doesn’t see the latter’s face. This other man is eventually revealed to be the Nazi doctor (Karlheinz Hackl) who forced Sophie, on her arrival at Auschwitz, to make the terrible choice between her two children – which one to save (at least for the time being) and which to condemn to immediate execution. Since the film audience doesn’t know this when we see the doctor talking to Höss, his identity means nothing to us; so that Sophie’s failure to recognise his voice doesn’t register either. Other moments in the film are weightless simply as a result of slack direction: Stingo’s discovery from Sophie that her father was a rabid anti-Semite and not, as she’s previously claimed, a champion of Polish Jewry is one such anti-climax.
In his cinema debut, Kevin Kline does remarkable things as Nathan. Kline’s combination of menace and humour as a performer serve him well: the ability to make instant, complete switches between voices and personas enables him to suggest, at least superficially, Nathan’s alarming unpredictability. Alan Pakula’s fidelity to Styron means, however, that the secrets and lies of Sophie and Nathan are exposed mechanically and every new revelation is meant be a shocking one. It’s usually Stingo who is being enlightened and he is bound to be shocked because he is, in spite of being a major novelist in the making, utterly lacking in curiosity. He never speculates, for example, as to the causes of Nathan’s mania. (When Larry eventually explains things to him, Stingo doesn’t even murmur, ‘Well, I did wonder …’) This is more of a problem on screen because Peter MacNicol’s Stingo, although convincingly boyish, radiates intelligence as well as naïveté: you can believe that he’s dazzled by Nathan’s wit and force of personality; you can’t believe that Stingo instantly puts out of his mind Nathan’s crazily aggressive episodes – a convenient amnesia on which Styron’s storytelling repeatedly depends. As in the book, the Holocaust is used – that’s to say misused – chiefly as lurid context for the doomed love affair between Sophie and Nathan.
Meryl Streep’s transitions between the fun-loving, electrically animated Sophie and the numbed woman who gradually discloses her past create a genuinely tragic figure: we see Sophie’s appetite for sensual pleasure and joyful companionship; we also sense that she’s willing herself to enjoy the present as a means of keeping down the bitter reflux inside her. The numbed quality is partly thanks to the alcohol that Sophie drinks increasingly: Streep realises brilliantly both the anaesthetising effects of alcohol and in vino veritas (Sophie’s numbness is also in part a consequence of telling and, in so doing, confronting the truth). The early days in Sophie’s and Nathan’s relationship, when he finds her collapsed from malnutrition, in a New York library, and nurses her back to physical health are among the best in the film: Streep is beautifully frail and eccentric, Kevin Kline complements her wittily and tenderly, Pakula directs them sensitively. Streep often makes Sophie’s broken English really funny (the dialogue in the novel tries but heavy-handedly fails to do this). Seeing the film again for the first time in decades, I’d forgotten the little sounds she makes when Sophie is lightly scolding or disagreeing with Stingo. There’s a maternal flavour to this scolding, which, because of Sophie’s history as a mother, is very touching. It’s a measure of how fully Streep has absorbed the Polish accent that these non-verbal, guttural noises are as accented as the words that she speaks.
Pauline Kael wrote about Meryl Streep in this film as follows:
‘She has, as usual, put thought and effort into her work. But something about her puzzles me: after I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down. Is it possible that as an actress she makes herself into a blank and then focusses all her attention on only one thing – the toss of her head, for example, in Manhattan, her accent here? Maybe, by bringing an unwarranted intensity to one facet of a performance, she in effect decorporealizes herself.’
Not sure how much sense the theory makes (if Streep decided to concentrate on a character’s limp, would Kael not be able to visualise her from the waist up?) – but that’s beside the point. By the time she reviewed Sophie’s Choice, Pauline Kael was determined to be as negative as possible about Meryl Streep, however much ingenuity it took to be negative. If she’d wanted to see the work here in a favourable light, Kael might have reckoned Streep’s face and voice memorable because they are her most, rather than her only, compelling features. If Kael had wanted to be no more than fair, she would have acknowledged that Streep, for much of the time she’s on screen in Sophie’s Choice, is photographed, by Nestor Almendros, as a talking head. (Later in her review, Kael, with good reason, dismisses the film as ‘a novel being talked to us’.) Pauline Kael chose the wrong Meryl Streep movie to use as a launching pad for this particular missile. Streep embodies Sophie fully and complexly: in repose or when she’s in an embrace with Nathan or Stingo, Sophie is corporeally very present; in motion, she conveys a sense of urgency – the sense of a woman anxious to escape herself. In this role, Meryl Streep meshes completely her movements, expressions and gestures with the underlying feelings that generate them. It’s a great performance.
10-11 November 2015