Molly Haskell

“Alan Pakula, who directed Liza Minnelli in The Sterile Cuckoo, Jane Fonda in Klute, and Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice, is one of those directors who will sacrifice design of a film to details of performance. Actors and actresses love such a director, because he gives them plenty of room to breathe, but the rest of the movie can choke from lack of oxygen. “Meryl Streep so fills the air of Sophie's Choice that there's no breathing space left for audience or co-stars. It's a claustrophobic performance, but technically mesmerizing. Streep insists on showing us the awkward and comical aspects of Sophie-the-Pidgin-English-speaking Polish refugee, as well as her more seductive qualities. In her anemic period, she really is the "Ting to scarr de birrds" as she says--rotting teeth, thinning hair, and green under the gills. Molly Haskell Vogue, February 1983, "Star Take" Haskell wrote extensively about Streep in Sophie's Choice: “Frances Farmer … and Sophie Zawistowska . . . are not only the biggest and most important roles for women to come along in some time, they are also the darkest. Jessica Lange's gallant but reckless Frances and Meryl Streep's ill-fated Sophie may reflect a new mood of pessimism among women, the future seen as a series of impossible choices rather than as one of limitless possibilities. “Nonetheless I urge you to overcome your misgivings and see and savor these films for--if nothing else--two astonishing performances. Utterly unlike as they are, Lange and Streep are uncanny in the way they evoke existing legends while creating new ones of their own. “…. [In Styron's novel], [w]ith one arm outstretched in sexual abandon; the other bearing the telltale identification number, Sophie was always something of a fantasy--the sort of improbable combination of qualities that might be conjured up when a young man's fancy turns to love, lust, literature, and large questions of Good and Evil. “As filtered through the eyes of Stingo, the aspiring novelist … Sophie is more a succession of states (pitiable refugee, tantalizing older woman, demonically possessed lover, window onto the Holocaust, instrument of Stingo's awakening, etc.) than a real person. “Alan Pakula's scrupulously faithful and richly atmospheric adaptation gives full rein to Streep's chameleon-like inventiveness in her most physical performance to date. She trips over "the English" in her charmingly comical Polish accent, falls on the floor with anemia, blossoms under the solicitude of her mad lover Nathan (Kevin Kline). But in the end, her guilt defines her, and we know no more about her interior life than we did at the beginning. What was missing from the character to begin with is still missing: some core identity that Meryl Streep, a mistress of self-disguise who will never be accused of just "playing herself," can't supply. “It doesn't help that the two male parts have been pruned to give full prominence to Sophie, so that she seems to be acting directly for the audience rather than with her co-stars. For all these reasons, I found myself more intrigued by the actress than moved by the character, fascinated by Meryl's "choices" rather than Sophie's Choice. “Frances is a distinctly inferior film…, yet Jessica Lange grabs one by the short hairs in a way that Streep never does.” Haskell Vogue, date? “…. Sophie’s Choice is a love story that fails to move us, a tale of horror that fails to grab us by the short hairs. “Streep—did anyone doubt it?—is uncanny, so completely transforming into the refugee heroine that she not only speaks an impeccable halting English, her English seems actually to improve as she goes along. “You see how I butcher the English,” she says, as she does so, charmingly. She is a veritable chameleon of moods and physical states: pale and anemic one minute, her cheekbones cutting a silhouette against a hostile background; robust and voluptuous the next, having been nursed to loving health by the attentive Nathan. “From Woody Allen’s lesbian ex-wife in Manhattan (1979) to the anomalous Victorian in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Streep has made a career of playing enigmas. She is a genius at self-disguise, changing her look, her voice, her personality, her hair (oh, especially that hair!) from role to role. I happen to find this talent more suited to the theater than to movies, where one misses that core identity of an actress that underlies and gives resonance to every character. Still, there’s no denying that the mysterious Sophie, who can hide even behind a language barrier, was tailor-made for Streep. If she casts a spell, it is not the traditional spell that blinds a lover to one’s faults, but one that revels in them, forcing us to see and respond to klutziness, awkwardness and hesitation as well as grace, sensuality, amplitude. “Actors who, by definition, care more for their own performances than for the overall design of a film, would love nothing better than a cinema that belongs to them, which is, in their jargon, all ‘moments,” all “choices.” That’s what Sophie’s Choice is: Meryl’s Choices. You can’t stop watching her, because every moment she is doing something, and she does nothing in a way that makes it impossible to watch anybody else. That, finally, is what unbalances the film: It is too much a one-woman show.” Molly Haskell Playgirl, March 1983 “Frances and Sophie's Choice belong to the category of films whose tragedies are set in the past, making their trouble and their troubling heroines somewhat less threatening. Not that these aren't towering roles for any age and by any criteria--strong, complex, hard-edged heroines played by women who can easily command center stage for two hours. Also, they are not victims in the classical sense. Their ordeals are to some extent self-inflicted. They choose, if it is only a Hobson's choice. “But they are hardly free, either. Frances is swept along by the tide of her own destructiveness; Sophie by being a Pole under German occupation. Moreover, Sophie, vivid and memorable as she is, is further removed form her own consciousness by being a projection of William Styron's, through his young surrogate, Stingo. As directed by Alan Pakula, and played by the astonishing, chameleon-like Meryl Streep, Sophie is a phantom woman, appearing here as one (male) desire, there as another. She is alternately Stingo's muse, the instrument of his awakening to suffering and death, a ministering angel of sex, a surrogate mother, a martyr, a beauty who dies rather than face the reality of old age and possible rejection on a Virginia farm. “Most important, she is an uninhibited sensualist. In the context of the '40s and Styron's portrait of the artist as a horny young man, she is a reproach to all the virgins and teases who gave the aspiring writer a hard time. “As women, we can't help but sense in the apotheosis of a fantasy like Sophie, the rejection of all other less "giving," less abandoned women. She is an art-house Bo Derek, a thinking man's "10" by whose measure all other women are demoted….” Haskell Psychology Today, January 1983 Haskell has continued to write ambivalently about Streep over the years, about her technical skill, her intellectual style, her tendency not to reveal herself on screen.