Michael Atkinson

Michael Atkinson featured Streep's performance in the monthly "Greatish Performances" column of the October 1995 Movieline. Though not unanimous in his praise of all her performances, Atkinson terms Streep a "marvelous movie creature" who has "always been more than the sum of her formidable technique." Atkinson admires her "Raphaelite" beauty and calls her smile "the warmest … in Hollywood." Sophie's Choice was "the role of her career. The Academy nominated four other actresses that year just out of courtesy." “… Sophie has survived Auschwitz, something her young children didn't manage, and so her entire persona is a tightrope walk between the present moment and the abyss of the past. Sophie covers up her scars by being, in essence, a technical actress, and Streep shows us both her fragmentation and her skill at shipping up emotional camouglage. Sophie's sad gaze is half helpless lie, half naked honesty. Streep has the Polish accent down, of course, but watch how she has Sophie use that accent differently in each scene, fumbling her English coquettishly in the company of some, grimly steadying it for others. “Seeing Streep at work is like looking through a kaleidoscope; no other actress gives us so much to watch. And no other actress makes as much of close-ups. Every moment Sophie's alive is a struggle, and Streep lets us see the helter-skelter car chase of emotional turbulence run across her face. Yet it's so subtle you're not surprised when the movie's other characters never notice. [In her monologues and in the flashbacks, where Sophie is "forced into one sanity-ruining decision after another",] Streep shows us something new every second, while Sophie herself intends on revealing only a little. You see Sophie's fear, but it's cut with shrewdenss, self-loathing, wonder, humiliation and exhaustion. Streep somehow turns her character inside out for us, and yet there's no playing to the back rows, no Garboesque stoicism, no overripe psychodrama. “In the end, Streep's daunting chameleon-ness and immaculate accents are profoundly beside the point. Sophie is hardly a collection of techniques--she's a complete person whose depths we have, by the movie's melancholy conclusion, only begun to explore. Like Sophie, Streep knows it's important to hide as much as you reveal. Most movie characters can be defined by a handful of adjectives; Sophie is a mystery you could spend a lifetime unraveling.” Michael Atkinson "Greatish Performances" Movieline, October, 1995