Sophie's Choice
1982, 99 minutes
Between the innocent, the romantic, the sensual, and the unthinkable. There are still some things we have yet to imagine.
In 1947, the movie's narrator, Stingo (Peter MacNicol), relocates to Brooklyn in order to write a novel and is befriended by Sophie Zawistowski (Meryl Streep), a Polish immigrant, and her lover, Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline). One evening, Stingo learns from Sophie that she was married but her husband and her father were killed in a German work camp and that she was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nathan is constantly jealous, and when he is in one of his violent mood swings he convinces himself that Sophie is unfaithful to him and abuses and harasses her. There is a flashback showing Nathan rescuing Sophie from near death from anemia shortly after her immigration to the U.S. Sophie eventually reveals that her father was a Nazi sympathizer. Sophie had a lover, Józef (Neddim Prohic), who lived with his half-sister, Wanda (Katharina Thalbach), a leader in the Resistance. Wanda tried to convince Sophie to translate some stolen Gestapo documents, but fearing she might endanger her children, she declined. Two weeks later Józef was murdered by the Gestapo, and Sophie was arrested and sent to Auschwitz with her children. Upon arrival, Sophie is forced to choose which one of her two children is gassed and which proceeds to the concentration camp. To avoid having both children killed, she chooses Jan (Adrian Kaltika), her son, to be sent to the children's camp, and her daughter, Eva (Jennifer Lawn), to be sent to her death in Crematorium Two. Nathan tells Sophie and Stingo that the research that he is doing at the pharmaceutical company is so groundbreaking that he will win the Nobel Prize. At a meeting with Nathan's physician brother, Stingo learns that Nathan is mentally ill (paranoid schizophrenic) and that all of the "research facilities" that Nathan has worked at have been "expensive funny farms." (He has a job in the library of a pharmaceutical firm, which his brother got for him, and occasionally helps researchers with their research, but otherwise, is not one at all.) After Nathan discharges a firearm over the telephone in a violent rage, Sophie and Stingo flee to a hotel. She reveals to him the tragic episode of the choice between her children in Auschwitz. Sophie and Stingo make love, but while Stingo is sleeping, Sophie, tormented by her memory, returns to Nathan, where both Sophie and Nathan commit suicide by taking cyanide. Stingo moves away from Brooklyn and into a small farm his father recently inherited in southern Virginia to finish writing his novel. [<a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_Choice_(film)'>Plot summary provided by WikiPedia</a>]
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