The last movie I am reviewing on the American Film Institute’s (AFI) Greatest 100 American Films of All Time list is Sophie’s Choice (1982).  It is number ninety-one by their rendering.  I suppose I should apologize for not going in numeric order, but does it really matter?  Lately, I have been despairing of the movies that I have been seeing to round out these rankings.  They have made me wonder how some of these are listed on it at all.  By that same token, I feel today’s film should be much higher.  There are other entries that deal with similar subjects, like Schindler’s List (1993), which is the Holocaust.  That is number eight according to AFI.  The difference with Sophie’s Choice is that there is a little less time spent on that horrible historical event, and it is a more personal story.  In any case, I would argue that it is just as powerful, and despite being sad on a number of levels, is worth watching.

Despite the title, Sophie’s Choice is told from the perspective of Stingo (Peter MacNicol).  He is a young, aspiring writer who moves to what is father considers the “Sodom of the North,” that being New York, and rents a room in a boarding house in a place as strange as Brooklyn.  This is Stingo’s description, anyway.  He is not long for his new surroundings when he meets his neighbors under stressful circumstances.  Living on the floor above him is Zofia “Sophie” Zawistowski (Meryl Streep), and the first time she lays eyes on Stingo is in the middle of a violent argument she is having with her boyfriend Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline).  This is confusing for Stingo because he earlier received an invitation from the two of them to have a social call.  When Nathan notices Stingo looking on, Nathan turns on the younger man and begins insulting his Southern roots.  Nathan leaves and Stingo retreats to his room, but eventually Sophie comes down with some food to apologize for the craziness.  After a few hours, Nathan comes to his senses, too, and everyone is friends once more.  This begins a friendship between the three of them.  In his lucid periods, Nathan is brilliant, and he goes on about the important work he is doing as a biologist working for Pfizer.  Sophie is somewhat more mysterious.  She had been in a concentration camp during World War II, even though she was a Polish Catholic.  She also talks about her father and a husband, both of whom she says were staunchly against Hitler and the Nazis.  This is what led to their capture and execution.  This aspect interests Nathan, who often wants Sophie to talk about her experiences during those dark days.  Few subjects are as likely to set him off as talking about the Holocaust.  As their relationship unfolds, Stingo continues to work on a novel.  Nathan tricks Stingo into giving the curious man a draft, something about which Stingo is quite sensitive.  Instead, Nathan takes the two of them to the Brooklyn Bridge and hails Stingo as the next Whitman.  Things are going along fine until the day that Nathan comes home from work after telling Sophie and Stingo about the huge breakthrough he has had in the laboratory.  They prepare a celebration for Nathan.  However, when he enters the room, he accuses Sophie of cheating on him with her boss and storms out, vowing to never see either of them ever again.  Sophie and Stingo are stunned, and he decides that it is time to head home to Virginia and a farm that his father inherited and which he wants Stingo to run.  Before he leaves, he tries to find Sophie.  In the process, he learns that Sophie’s father was actually an anti-Semite.  When next he sees her, she explains why she lied.  Basically, she did not want to remember her father by his crimes, though it was for working against the Nazis that led to her arrest along with her children.  There is a long flashback here that details her experiences at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.  Her daughter had been killed immediately, and her son put into a separate area of the grounds for children.  Meanwhile, she is sent to work for the commandant, Rudolf Höss (Günther Maria Halmer), owing to her language skills.  She is approached by inmates involved in the resistance who want her to use her womanly charms to steal a radio for them.  This backfires, and even though she gets the commandant to release her son and let her see him one last time, this promise goes unfulfilled.  As a result, she blames herself for their deaths.  Stingo is understanding and it seems to have an effect on her.  Nonetheless, as soon as a repentant Nathan shows up, Sophie runs back to his arms.  Everything is mended once more until Stingo receives a call from Larry Landau (Stephen D. Newman), who explains to Stingo the reason for Nathan’s mood swings.  He is not a biologist at Pfizer, but rather a paranoid schizophrenic, and Larry asks Stingo to watch over Nathan.  Stingo reluctantly agrees, and returns to the boarding house armed with this knowledge.  He enters Sophie’s apartment to find Nathan proposing to her.  Unfortunately, the following morning has Nathan with a gun and threatening to kill Sophie and Stingo. Having had enough, Stingo takes Sophie and they board a train heading south.  They get to Washington D.C. and rent a hotel room for the night.  He asks her to marry him, and says they will live out the rest of their lives on the farm his father has asked him to manage.  She refuses, and gives the reason why.  You see, when she first arrived at Auschwitz, one of the officers forces her to choose between her children.  Either she picks one to go to the gas chamber and letting the other live, or they would both die.  She opts for her son, and her daughter is immediately killed.  In Sophie’s eyes, this makes her an unfit mother.  Stingo disagrees, and that night they make love.  The next morning, he finds a note from her saying that she has gone back to New York and Nathan.  Stingo gets to his former boarding house in time to find Nathan and Sophie dead on her bed.  The film concludes with Stingo strolling back across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Sophie’s Choice is an incredibly sad movie, and I usually do not recommend films with such content.  Yet, this is an important film to see because it shows what past wounds can do to a person.  There are a few moments when Sophie talks about having given up her Faith because of what happened to her during the war.  She is hardly the first person to blame God for her troubles, and she will certainly not be the last.  The thing is, God did not make the Holocaust happen.  People often find this to be lazy logic.  Taken further, the notion goes that if God existed and loved us, He would not let bad things happen to us.  Such arguments did not take any reality of what it means to practice the Faith into consideration.  Also, let us not forget that He sent His only Son into the world to die on a Cross.  The problem is death.  Understandably, most people do not want to die.  You also do not have to experience this kind of physical martyrdom in order to follow Him.  The point is that He understands what you are going through, and because of that, can heal you if you let Him. Still, if this is too high-falutin of a theological conversation for you, look up the life of St. Maximilian Kolbe.  He was a Polish Franciscan who willingly went to his death in the gas chambers to save the life of another.  I bring him up only as a cultural parallel to Sophie.  Clearly, she did not have the opportunity to lay down her life as St. Maximilian Kolbe.  At the same time, just being in a concentration camp was a martyrdom in itself.  The sad part is that Sophie could not get past it, and it ended up causing her to make choices that led to her death.  She did not deserve to die, nor did the six million Jews during the Holocaust or any of us.  Sophie had survivors’ guilt, and that is not something we are equipped to let go of without God.

I know I am ending my exploration of AFI’s top 100 on a sad note.  This is bound to happen whenever you watch a movie that deals with the Holocaust.  Regardless, I am not upset that this was the last one from the list.  I am ready to move on.  See this film and take it as a lesson on the importance of doing this yourself if this applies to you.