Driving by his deep will of writing his first novel, Stingo, an ambitious novelist, who moves to live in New York, where he meets Sophie, a young woman and her boyfriend, who act weirdly, the thing that challenges him.
The way Streep inhabits Sophie, and brings her history to life whether she's explicitly talking about the past or carrying herself across the room with wounded grace, can't help but make parts of the rest of the film seem smaller by comparison.
The picture is completely devoid of cinematic interest, adopting instead a tiresome theatrical aesthetic in which showy monologues are filmed in interminable, usually ill-chosen long takes.
The movie is too Hollywood in look and feel, and the flashback and narration are too conventional, and yet the image of the sickly and pale Meryl Streep recollecting her ordeal lingers in memory long after the film is over.
And while Meryl Streep's performance is largely worthy of its laurels ... the film around it is much harder to forgive. Beyond Streep, Sophie's Choice is little more than a tediously assembled WWII drama of interminable length.
Though it's far from a flawless movie, Sophie's Choice is a unified and deeply affecting one. Thanks in large part to Miss Streep's bravura performance, it's a film that casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell.
Movie Mom at Yahoo! Movies
July 20, 2003
Heartbreakingly lovely performances.
Antagony & Ecstasy
November 05, 2009
A suffocating 151 minutes long, with a healthy portion of that running time devoted to a hunk of Holocausploitation of the most crass and cynical variety. And that's the good part.
