Stephen Schiff

“For about half of Sophie's Choice, Meryl Streep gives the Meryl Streep performance we've been waiting for. As Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor living in Brooklyn, she isn't one of her usual quavery mystery women, hiding behind shimmering sheets of hair and a tense bud of a mouth. This is Streep in bloom, with cascading golden curls and a seductive raspberry-colored smile that softens the hard symmetries of her face. Sophie's Choice proves it--Streep needs a role with humor. Her best performance until now was in The Seduction of Joe Tynan, in which she was sexy and droll, delivering naughty dialogue in a Southern accent that oozed insinuation. Here she has an accent, too: Polish, and perfectly modulated. Streep gives us a Sophie who uses her foreigner's clumsiness, who turns her malapropisms into a form of high wit, who makes her hesitancy heavy-lidded, seductive. She's like a musician, playing that accent of hers, articulating a phrase in a way that gives it the inevitability of a remembered melody. [Could an actress for whom English is not native have done as well?] She's a master of pauses: she'll stretch one out and then suddenly swoop into a chatty line like a soloist into an arpeggio. But Sophie's Choice isn't content with her virtuosity; it digs behind her sunny character into the past that formed it. And when the movie drags us into flashbacks of Sophie in the camps, shaven-headed and spindly, Streep's acting turns glum. Instead of building a harrowing portrait of ravagement (the way Vanessa Redgrave did in TV's Playing for Time), Streep becomes a mystery woman again: silent, huddled, tense, hiding behind that stony mask….” Stephen Schiff Boston Phoenix, January 23, 1983 Schiff on Streep in Kramer v. Kramer: “….[T]hough she radiates coolness and mystery, it's the mystery of a soul in turmoil …. What Streep does under the skin is more than what most actors accomplish with their whole bodies ….”