A single wrenching moment—that of the title—has become the legacy of this sprawling, somewhat ungainly adaptation of the William Styron novel. This is partly because of the agony of the decision, but mostly because of the groundwork that Meryl Streep has laid for the two-plus hours preceding it. When Streep’s Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish Holocaust survivor, recalls being forced to choose whether her little boy or little girl gets to live upon arriving at Auschwitz, Streep imbues the dramatized flashback with a raw, bewildered, impulsive despair. Informing that scene, however, have been the many others leading up to it. These take place in post-war Brooklyn, where Sophie is trying to flee the ghosts of her past by starting a new life with an erratic Jewish lover (Kevin Kline) and their downstairs neighbor (Peter MacNicol), an aspiring Southern writer clearly modeled on Styron. Even during the threesome’s most frolicking scenes, Streep has a haunted, vacant quality; it’s as if Sophie exists in two eras at the same time. Sophie delivers three “confessions” over the course of the film, each delivered by Streep with what can only be called a commanding fragility. (Director Alan J. Pakula, who also wrote the screenplay, and cinematographer Nestor Almendros shoot one of them as an Ingmar Bergman-like portrait, with deep blacks surrounding Streep’s face as she looks ever-so-slightly off camera.) Each of these confessions deepens and complicates the character of Sophie Zawistowska, who comes to stand in for global guilt and moral confusion in the aftermath of World War II. As a whole, Sophie’s Choice struggles to give this ambitious undertaking a strong narrative structure, while Kline and MacNicol fail to meet Streep’s level (Kline feels too contemporary and MacNicol too slight). The peerless Streep, who won her first Best Actress Oscar here, does something that’s operating on a different, remarkable: her Sophie simultaneously looks right through you and deep into your soul.
(4/27/2026)
