BEFORE: And this will wrap up Streep-a-Thon. No, I didn't get to every Streep movie (I don't have copies of "The Devil Wears Prada" or "The River Wild" or "A Cry in the Dark"), but I think she's been represented well on the blog to date.
THE PLOT: Sophie, the survivor of Nazi concentration camps, has found a reason to live in Nathan, an American Jew obsessed with the Holocaust. They befriend Stingo, the movie's narrator, a young American writer new to New York City - but the happiness of Sophie and Nathan is endangered by her ghosts and his obsessions.
AFTER: Well, that was something of a downer. I don't have much criticism of the plot tonight, once a movie evokes the Holocaust it's hard to find nitpick points.
I find no fault with Streep's accent, either - I've had co-workers from Eastern Europe (Latvia and Serbia) and her cadence here is exactly what I've heard in their voices. So to represent someone from Poland who now speaks English, to me she got it exactly right.
My problem with a film like this comes from reading reviews in advance, and knowing too much about the plot. The choice that Sophie has to make, as revealed late in the film, was almost anti-climactic to me. Knowing so much movie trivia often results in plot spoilers of the highest order, which can affect my rating system.
But there's another choice made in the film, one not usually mentioned in reviews. Sophie has an option to run away with Stingo, during one of Nathan's bouts of madness - which should come as no surprise, in one of the first scenes in the film he's a raving lunatic, but since we want to like the character we try to believe it's an isolated incident. Sophie makes the choice to return to Nathan, representing love, weakness and co-dependency, and the consequences of that choice determine her fate.
Or maybe it's the choice she was forced to make in the concentration camp, which is still haunting her. Good discussion topics, I suppose. But entertaining? Not sure.
Also starring Kevin Kline (last heard in "The Tale of Despereaux"), Peter MacNicol (last heard in a different mouse-based film, "The Secret of NIMH 2").
RATING: 3 out of 10 cans of spam.
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