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It's hard to believe I missed this great film till now.Meryl Streep as Sophie and Kevin Kline as Nathan and Peter MacNicol as Stingo are the focus of what appears to be a typical love triangle in the making set in 1947 Brooklyn.Stingo is a southern aspiring writer who moves to Brooklyn to launch his writing of the "big"novel and meets Sophie and her lover Nathan who have a very tempestuous love life.Soon enough Stingo becomes "best friend"of both and a weird triangle ensues.Simple enough,seen that,nothing special.The acting is fine and although we learn early on that Sophie is a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp,it seems to be little more than a post war love of life and experimental relationship film.
POW !!! your hit like a ton of bricks when Sophie starts telling Stingo of her past after more problems with Nathan.Nathan it seems is obsessed with the Holocaust and frequently refers to Sophie and a whore and god knows how she survived the camps.The last hour or so is as powerful a attempt to illustrate in individual terms what happened to those who lived through the Holocaust and how they did,as I have ever seen on film without having real archive footage.Filmed in German dialect with subtitles to add to the realism its hard to watch and when you finally learn what "Sophie's Choice"really was,well,I cried.I admit it,I did.The ending was a modern tragedy and the boy from the south learned what life was all about,perhaps.Its a long story but the characters are so well drawn and when the camp flashbacks begin you can't turn away and the film seems to end before it should.You want to know even more.Released in 1982 and a SHORT 150 minutes there's no reason to take ANY stars off. Trailer URL follows the pix.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgTcyQ7iTS8
POW !!! your hit like a ton of bricks when Sophie starts telling Stingo of her past after more problems with Nathan.Nathan it seems is obsessed with the Holocaust and frequently refers to Sophie and a whore and god knows how she survived the camps.The last hour or so is as powerful a attempt to illustrate in individual terms what happened to those who lived through the Holocaust and how they did,as I have ever seen on film without having real archive footage.Filmed in German dialect with subtitles to add to the realism its hard to watch and when you finally learn what "Sophie's Choice"really was,well,I cried.I admit it,I did.The ending was a modern tragedy and the boy from the south learned what life was all about,perhaps.Its a long story but the characters are so well drawn and when the camp flashbacks begin you can't turn away and the film seems to end before it should.You want to know even more.Released in 1982 and a SHORT 150 minutes there's no reason to take ANY stars off. Trailer URL follows the pix.
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