Review of Sophie's Choice (91)

Much like Goodfellas, the Sophie's Choice DVD was cracked when it arrived in our mailbox.  This continued our streak of bad luck as it was the second movie in a row off of the list that came to us damaged.  This time, however, we decided to have a new copy shipped to us instead of running around Fargo looking for it.  Jason didn't want to risk having to set foot in Blockbuster Video again.

Plot
Sophie, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, has found a reason to live in Nathan, an American Jew obsessed with the Holocaust. They befriend Stingo, a young writer, who recently moved into the same boarding house as the couple in Brooklyn, New York.  However, the happiness shared between Sophie and Nathan is endangered by her ghosts and his obsessions.

Jason's Thoughts
Sophie's Choice as a whole definitely wasn't for me.  There were parts of the movie that I enjoyed, however, the majority of it seemed to drag on which made it hard to hold my interest.  The Polish accent Meryl Streep used didn't make my experience any better either.  Don't get me wrong, she did a great job with it, but it got to the point where I finally had to turn the subtitles on, which to my amazement, didn't even exist in English.  I'm not too fluent in Spanish and I haven't even touched the French language, so the subtitles on the DVD didn't do much good for me.  Thus, I had to stick it out and do the best I could on my own.

I did enjoy the flashbacks of her time in the camp, which in my mind were the best parts of Sophie's Choice and saved it from being labeled a one-star movie.  It's just too bad that it only amounts to about 30 minutes, which makes the other two hours of the film seem like an eternity.  I know this is based off of a book, but I really wished the movie would have focused more on her time in the camp instead of how she ended up dealing with it.  There are plenty of movies about the Holocaust out there, but the small parts in this movie seemed to have a different take on it and would have been interesting to see them played out. 

Instead, we got to see how she dealt with the choices of her past by being in a weird relationship with an abusive partner and a young author.  As far as her "choice" goes, I guess it didn't quite have the same impact on me, a non-parent who doesn't want children, so I wasn't really able to relate to her pain and suffering.  I'm sure most of the people who have seen this found it heart wrenching, but it was hard for me to do so as most of my interest was lost by that point.

This may be a tearjerker for some, but it's not for everybody.

Crystal's Thoughts
I had been looking forward to this movie for quite some time, especially since it was finally going to be a chick flick on the 100 movie list.   Unfortunately, the movie couldn't have been a bigger let down.  While I understand how this was to portray how the choice Sophie made changed her life for the worst, so much more could have went into this move to make it more powerful.  The moments in which we were taken back to her time in the concentration camps were very compelling.  At those times, I felt that this movie did in fact gain the praise it was given.  But those times were rare and short in duration.  

While the acting was strong in the movie (though I am still not a Meryl Streep fan), the storyline lacked substance.  Like the characters, it was all over the place.  At times, I felt the movie was more about Nathan than Sophie as he was always on some lunatic craze, which was more the focus.  I really think this screenplay should have spent several more weeks in the editor's hand.  So much more could have been done with this to truly show it as Sophie's choice. 

Comments

No comments have been posted.