#91 Sophie's Choice (1982)

It's the "feel horrible" movie of the century.  Come one, come all.

Plot summary (with spoilers): The weirdo European dude from Ghostbusters II announces through some slightly overwrought narration that his name is Stingo, and he's a twenty-two year old farm boy from Virginia, who has traveled to big bad Brooklyn to find himself and gain an education in life.  It's 1946, just a year and a half after the end of the Second World War.  Stingo arrives at a large pink house that serves as an apartment complex of sorts.  He meets the landlady, and moves in downstairs.  There's one other neighbor upstairs.  When he gets inside his room, there is a note there from the upstairs neighbors, Sophie and Nathan, who welcome him to the neighborhood.  That night, he hears loud arguing, shaking his chandelier.  He opens his door and looks outside.  Sophie and Nathan are on the stairway.  Nathan is screaming at Sophie, calling her a disease, and saying he wants nothing more to do with her.  He turns to leave, and sees Stingo standing in the doorway.  He sneers at Stingo for "eavesdropping", then makes some dumb Southern hick jokes and tells Stingo that he's not pleased to meet him, and thrilled that he will never see him again.  He exits the building.
Stingo asks Sophie if she's okay.  She mumbles yes, then runs upstairs.  The next day she appears at his door with a tray with dinner on it.  She offers it to him as an apology and stammers that Nathan is not normally like that.  He asks her about her accent, and she says she's Polish, and he notices a tattoo with a number on her arm.  So I guess she's a real rebellious type of woman, then, to get a tattoo in 1946?  Stingo invites her in, but she declines, leaving the dinner.
Later that night, Stingo walks upstairs with the tray, and leaves it on her doorstep.  The door is ajar, and he sees her sleeping inside.  Suddenly, Nathan comes home.  Stingo hides and watches Nathan come upstairs, and curl up at Sophie's feet.  She awakes, and he mumbles apologies and they get all kissy-kissy and all that.  Stingo shuffles back downstairs.
The next day, Nathan and Sophie arrive at Stingo's window, waking him up.  Nathan apologizes for the other day, and says they want to make it up to him with a night on the town.  Stingo is quite happy to join them.  Stingo needs to watch more Oprah and learn how to recognize the signs of an abuser.  Stingo meets them later up in the apartment, and they are dressed up with silly hats and canes, and Sophie's got a fur.  Someone throw some red paint on her! Nathan explains that they like to dress up silly from time to time.  Farm boy Stingo is utterly enchanted by the two of them and their total trying-too-hard bullshit. Nathan says he is a biologist working on a big secret project. Sophie explains that she knows multiple languages, because her father taught her them growing up in Poland. She says she and Nathan met a year ago when he saved her life, shortly after she was liberated from a concentration camp in Poland.  Stingo assumes she is Jewish, but she reveals that while Nathan is Jewish, she is not and is in fact a Catholic.  Stingo's dying to ask how a Catholic ended up in a camp, but remembers that Miss Manners says concentration camp inquires during lunch are rude until after Labor Day.  We see a flashback of Sophie arriving in America and learning English.  The professor reads to her a poem, by Emily Dickinson, and she goes to the library the next day to read more.  She's very weak and her English is poor, and she asks the writer for a book of poetry by "Emil Dickens".  The librarian is a total dick and says there's no such name, and then she passes out.  Nathan rushes to her side, commenting as she lay there about her beauty.  He takes her back to his apartment, and says his brother is a doctor and will check her out.  It turns out she had a severe iron deficiency, and Nathan slowly nursed her back to health.
Montage of the three of them spending several days or weeks together, laughing at the park, riding a roller coast at the fair, sitting in a hammock together or lounging on the roof of the apartment complex.  Stephen Baldwin, Josh Charles, and Lara Flynn Boyle, eat your heart out!
One night, Nathan is late coming home from the lab.  Sophie is worried and calls Stingo to come over and wait with her.  She considers calling the police, but Stingo talks her out of it. She asks him about the novel he's writing.  He says it's semi-autobiographical, about a boy who's mother dies when he's twelve.  She says it's always hard to lose people you love, and he asks her who she's lost.  She reveals that her father and husband were killed by the Germans when they invaded Poland.  She and her mother were allowed to live in their home, but her mother was sick and malnourished and needed meat.  Unfortunately, only Germans were allowed to eat meat, but Sophie's big plan was to steal a ham, stick it under her dress and pretend she was pregnant. Unfortunately, a German solider caught her on the train and arrested her, and that's how she ended up at the camp.  The Germans were quite tough on crime.
During the story, Stingo wipes her tears and strokes her face to the point of annoying distraction.  Nathan arrives home, unseen by them. He's acting creepy and cold, and is clearly suspicious of Stingo's motivations.  Sophie scolds him, and says she invited Stingo over because she was wondering why he hadn't come home yet, and was worried.  Nathan eventually calms down and seems to buy the story.
The next day, Nathan visits Stingo and asks about the novel he's writing.  Stingo shows it to him.  Suddenly, Nathan gleefully grabs the manuscript and races out of the room, laughing.  Stingo playfully chases him. Sophie intercepts Stingo at the door and explains that she will spend the day with him while Nathan reads the novel.  Stingo thinks this is a fine deal, indeed. When they return home that night, Nathan links both their arms and runs them out of the apartment.  They go running through the streets until they reach a bridge.  Nathan reveals he has three glasses and champagne, and the three of them toast to the brilliance of Stingo's novel and his inevitable success as a writer.
Another scene, Stingo and Sophie are at the park, lying around and eating.  Nathan comes running up with several boxes, and says he has amazing news.  He grabs them both and dances around.  He gives them each a box, and inside are fancy dinner outfits.  He says that his lab made an incredible amazing breakthrough at work today, but he can't tell them what it is yet!  He instructs them to wear those outfits and meet him tonight in the apartment.  That night, Stingo and Sophie excitedly prepare for their three-person romantic evening, cooking dinner by candlelight in their fancy new digs. Sophie reveals that she bought Nathan an expensive pocket watch that she really couldn't afford, but hey, Nathan's worth it.  You might have an inkling where this is going.
Nathan arrives home, looking disheveled and moving slowly.  The other two don't notice at first, and pop the champagne.  Stingo wants to know what the biology breakthrough was at work.  Nathan snarls, and tells him his book is shit, and then accuses Sophie of cheating on him with her boss.  He leans over her, slobbering and sweaty, and says it's very suspicious that she, as a non-Jew, was sent to the camps, and somehow was the only one in her family who lived.  She begs him to stop, and finally (FINALLY!) after several minutes, Stingo tries to get him  to do just that, grabbing at Nathan.  Nathan pushes him off, and throws him out of the apartment, while Sophie stammers apologies.
The next day, both Sophie and Nathan are gone.  Stingo asks the landlady where they went, and she says she doesn't know, but they left separately.  Stingo goes to Sophie's work at the library.  The boss there says she isn't there.  Then, in a weird bit of really shitty and clunky exposition, volunteers that he's from Poland, and that he knew who her father was.  Turns out he was a racist and Nazi sympathizer and academic who wrote at length about the Jews and how they were destroying Europe.  Stingo is stunned.  He wants to know how it was that the father was killed.  The boss speculates that sometimes academics were killed without regard to their affiliation.
Stingo returns to the apartment.  Sophie is there.  She apologizes for Nathan the night before.  He gently confronts her with what he learned, and she invites him to watch her flashback story.  It seems she worked for her father helping him write speeches about the "evil" plague of Jews in Poland. She was shocked at the terrible speeches he made, but helped write them anyway.  Unfortunately, after he was killed, she was sent to the camps for the ham incident.  She adds to the story this time, admitting that she had two children. Her daughter was "exterminated", and her son was sent to a camp for children.  We see her at the camp, broken and limping and barely walking upright. They learn she speaks perfect German, so she is brought in from the prison part of the camp, to the Commandant's house.  The German solider walks her past the enslaved and dying prisoners and into the house just a few hundred yards away, where children are dancing and carefree.  She is cleaned up and takes dictation for the Commandant.  She reveals to the Commandant that she's not a Jew and says who her father is, and speaks perfect German to him as proof. She begs him for mercy.  He is unmoved, saying that even if she's not a dirty Jew, she's still a dirty Pol, and what's the difference, really?  She attempts to seduce him.  They are interrupted by another solider.  After the Commandant gets rid of him, he tells her that she's very beautiful and German-looking, and that he might have been moved to help her if he weren't shipping out the next day, anyway.  She tries a different tact, mentioning her son at the children's camp.  She says he's innocent, and looks German like her, and even speaks it.  She begs the Commandant to at least free her son and allow him to grow up a young boy in Germany.  The Commandant says he will do it.  She goes back to the camp the night, elated.
Outside of the flashback, Sophie tells Stingo that in fact, the Commandant did not keep his word and she never saw her son again.  She says that's when she first tried to kill herself, and she would be dead now if Nathan didn't need her to live for him.  Stingo holds her in his arms and asks her to live for him, too.  Sophie sees Nathan sitting outside in the yard, and she races out to see him.
All is forgiven yet again, and another quick montage of the three of them playing around fills me with anger.  Nobody seems interested in telling Nathan to fuck off.  One night, Stingo gets a phone call from Nathan's brother, the doctor, asking to see him.  Stingo meets the man, who reveals that Nathan isn't a biologist at all, and is in fact, insane and a drug addict.  The "job" he stays at late at night is actually a "funny farm".  Stingo is floored.  He asks Stingo to keep an eye on his brother.  Okay movie, this is the second time you've had random characters jump in and reveal key info.  Not cool.
He returns home, and finds Nathan and Sophie there, all decked out in Southern apparel.  Nathan tells Stingo they're dressed that way in his honor and they're going to all take a vacation together in Virginia as a honeymoon after he and Sophie get married.  Sophie turns to him in surprise at this, and Nathan proposes.  Sophie expresses reluctance at this step, and Nathan gets upset and storms out.
The next day, Sophie and Stingo await his return anxiously.  Nathan calls Stingo and screams at him awhile, Stingo just wants to know where he is.  He says he's in a neighboring town, then there's the sound of a gunshot.  Stingo and Sophie go to the town and get a hotel to sleep for the night.  They're unable to find Nathan.  At the hotel, Stingo blows Nathan's spot re: the biology lie, but Sophie is unsurprised.  Stingo proposes to her, and asks her to go down to live with him on a farm in Virginia (way to ride Nathan's coattails, dude).  She agrees to the farm, but not the marriage.  Stingo says in Virginia they won't abide by a man and a woman living together without being married (behind the curve as always, eh, Virginia?) She says she can't because she would not make a good mother, and can't give him any children.  He confidently says she'd be a great mother, which prompts Sophie to offer compelling evidence to the contrary.
One last flashback.  She lied before about her kids.  She stood in line, with hundreds of others, carrying her daughter while her son stood clutching her side.  The guards walked by her, sneering.  One made eye contact with her, said something snide.  She responded in German, said she didn't belong here, it was all a mistake, she's not one of them, she's pure, please help.  The guard asked if she was Christian.  Yes, devout Catholic.  Did not Christ say "suffer the children"?  Choose one.  What?  Choose one child.  One will live, one will die.  No, I can't.  Choose!  Or they both will die. Please don't!  Guards!  Take her children!  My daughter, take my daughter! Her daughter was ripped out of her arms and she screamed so loud and so high, the others winced.  The guards whisked her away in a flash, leaving Sophie gasping and sobbing and clinging to her son.
Back at the hotel, Stingo and Sophie make love.  I would've thought that story was the ultimate boner-killer, but Stingo is twenty-two and a virgin, so what're ya gonna do?
The next morning, Sophie's gone.  Stingo returns to the apartment in Brooklyn.  The police are there, as well as a crowd of lookey-loos.  Stingo fights his way inside, and is taken by a detective up into Nathan and Sophie's apartment.  He sees them laying there on the bed in each other's arms, dead from cyanide. She made her choice.

Review: There's a lot of movies where the eccentric couple seduce the young newbie into their seemingly carefree and happy life, and soon learn that all is not what it seems.  This movie has that, but manages to put such an incredibly unique and dark spin on it, that it almost completely transcends the subgenre.  I knew about the "choice" ahead of time, again through pop culture osmosis, and didn't think I would be anywhere near as shocked and sickened when the time came.  The movie surprised me throughout, the reveal of Nathan's insanity was one of those great movie reveals, the ones where you are simultaneously surprised and smacking yourself on the head for not realizing.  Very well done.  Peter MacNichol and Kevin Kline are superb, with gravitas to spare, but of course the film belongs to Meryl.  It's of course technically proficient and an accomplishment in it's own right, to speak English with a flawless Polish accent, as well as both fluent Polish and German with what I'm gonna assume is also no accent.  But leaving all that aside, the performance is totally raw and believable.  If she were an unknown, I would be convinced she was really a foreigner.
That said, the movie did drag a little in a few parts, and the brother and Sophie's boss were such obviously clunky Exposition Fairies, that it irritated me a lot.  But I can't be too hard on a movie that was trying to tackle such a huge story like the Holocaust and make it so personal and intimate.  It very mostly succeeds.

Stars: Four out of five.

Does it deserve "Best 100" status: Yes, Meryl's performance puts it over the top.

Next up, I see dead people.  "Swing Time".  Oh, and also "The Sixth Sense".