Sophie’s Choice is a film about a woman, Zofia “Sophie” Zawistowski (Meryl Streep), a Polish immigrant and survivor of Nazi concentration camps, who now lives with her lover, Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline), a exuberant American Jew obsessed with the Holocaust. They befriend Stingo (Peter MacNicol), the movie’s narrator, a young American writer new to New York City. But the happiness of Sophie and Nathan is endangered by her ghosts and his obsessions.
In 1947, Stingo relocates to Brooklyn in order to write a novel and is befriended by Sophie and Nathan. Late one evening, Stingo learns from Sophie that she was married before. Her husband and her father were killed in a German work camp and that she was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Stingo notices that Nathan is constantly jealous. He convinces himself that Sophie is unfaithful to him and abuses her.
Sophie, a Polish Catholic, 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 Sophie declined, fearing she might endanger her children. Two weeks later Józef was murdered by the Gestapo, and Sophie was arrested and sent to Auschwitz with her children.
Meanwhile, Nathan tells Sophie and Stingo that the research he is doing at a 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 schools that Nathan had attended were “expensive funny farms.” Stingo learns that Nathan does have a job at a pharmaceutical firm, in the library.
After Nathan discharges a firearm over the telephone in a violent rage, Sophie and Stingo flee to a hotel. There, Sophie reveals to him the tragic choice she was forced to make at Auschwitz. Upon arrival, she was forced to choose which one of her two children would be gassed and which would proceed to the labor camp. To avoid having both children killed, she chose her son, Jan (Adrian Kaltika), to be sent to the children’s camp, and her daughter, Eva (Jennifer Lawn), to be sent to her death in Crematorium Two.
Character to watch: Meryl Streep as Zofia “Sophie” Zawistowski.
Journal your answers to the following questions after you watch the movie.
- How does this particular character’s journey compare with yours?
- Did the character develop certain characteristics during the movie that you have or that you would like to have? If so, what are those characteristics?
- What obstacles did this character face? What was his or her biggest challenge?
- What would you have done differently if you had been in the same position as the character?
- Is this character the type of person you would be friends with? Why or why not?