Director: Alan J. Pakula
Screenwriter: Alan J. Pakula
Based on a novel by William Styron

Sophie Zawistowski: Meryl Streep
Nathan Landau: Kevin Kline
Stingo: Peter MacNicol

I let my Netflix copy of Sophie's Choice (1982) gather dust for more than a week before finally sitting down to watch it.

The same thing happened when I rented Schindler's List (1993). Though not Jewish, I find depictions of the Nazi Holocaust extremely disturbing.

Unlike Schindler's List, however, which I finally viewed and from which I came away feeling was a great movie, Sophie's Choice was an unpleasant experience start to finish.

My negative reaction to the film was not based on its holocaust content, but on its sadistic misogyny.

I nearly stopped watching after the first time Nathan (Kevin Kline) subjects Sophie to a tirade. He humiliates her with insults, and equates her with various disgusting diseases. The character Stingo (Peter MacNicol) witnesses the brutality. It is his first contact with the couple with whom he becomes intimate.

What kept me watching:
1. I'd rented it and hated to waste it;
2. Meryl Streep's delicate beauty reminded me of a dear, lost friend, and
3. I wanted to get to the part that would explain the title.

The Stingo character is both prurient observer and participant. Twenty-two, he has come to the big city from a small southern community in order to make his way as a novelist. He finds cheap accommodations in Brooklyn, in the boarding house where Sophie and Nathan live.

In his good moods, Nathan is sunny, loving, and amusing. In his bad moods he is inexpressibly cruel, to Stingo as well as to Sophie.

Sophie's devotion to Nathan, despite the way he abuses her, is understandable. Self-loathing prompts her to crave the punishment which he so amply supplies.

Stingo's enduring love for Nathan, however, is not so easy to understand. Long before he learns of Nathan's mental illness, he accepts Nathan's brutal treatment of Sophie as an acceptable part of the relationship.

Stingo's motives are mixed. Self-love leads him to crave the "good" Nathan's praise of his writing, and lust for Sophie keeps him hoping that she will become his when she's had enough of the "bad" Nathan's treatment of her.

I had to fast-forward out of the distressing scene in which Nathan destroys the celebration dinner. Sophie has spent more than she can afford to buy and engrave a gold watch for him. He drops the watch into his glass of the champagne that financially-strapped Stingo has bought, and throws both gift and champagne to the floor. Again, he heaps filthy words on Sophie.

Informing us that poor Nathan can't help himself because he is the victim of schizophrenia, doesn't cut it for me. I've known too many women abused in this way by men who are technically "sane."

The tragic loading of the bed at the end is touching, but not from any sense that two precious lives have been cut short. Rather, it is moving and comes as a relief because two tormented souls are finally at rest.