Bewitching and Bewildering

By RICHARD CORLISS

SOPHIE'S CHOICE Directed and Written by Alan J. Pakula FRANCES Directed by Graeme Clifford; Screenplay by Eric Bergren, Christopher DeVore and Nicholas Kazan

She is the secret heroine of Hollywood movies: the divine masochist, the superior woman battered by fate, society, ham-fisted men and her own acute facility for self-destruction. Serious actresses, itching to play something more demanding than bimbettes and stand-by wives, love divine masochist roles. They get to run through huge emotions, from innocence through every sordid experience, often embracing rarefied forms of madness and an early, spectacular death. Playing the suffering saint can make and shape an actress's career (like Garbo's); it can win fans, raves and Oscars. This year the only sure shots for Best Actress nominations are two more divine masochists in dour year-end movies. Meryl Streep incarnates a tragic Polish heroine in an adaptation of William Styron's bestselling novel Sophie's Choice, and Jessica Lange slips under the fair, glistening skin of '30s Movie Star Frances Farmer in Frances.

Sophie Zawistowska is Camille at Auschwitz, the beautiful woman with a guilty secret, twice torn between two people she dearly loves, first in Poland, then in New York. Her catastrophic past has given her mercurial moods: giddy with ecstasy at the antics of her lover Nathan (Kevin Kline) and her puppy pursuer Stingo (Peter MacNicol), then darkly ruminative as memory provides her with waking nightmares. Even as sketched by Styron in overwrought prose, Sophie wove a spell over millions of readers.

Alan Pakula is a discreet stylist whose best movies (Klute, The Parallax View) find silky danger in the most commonplace phrases and gestures. But there were problems in adapting Styron's tale, to which Pakula deferred in his dogged fidelity to the book. For one thing, the choice Sophie must make takes place years before the main story begins; so the film must switch tracks halfway through for a half-hour flashback to a Nazi death camp. Though the sequence is as strong and beautifully detailed as the rest of Pakula's work, the events it depicts could have been narrated by Sophie in a few minutes, and should have been. (The film runs about 2 1/2 hours.) But Sophie is not the only obsessed person in this romantic trinity: Nathan has his lunar side too, which flashes on and off at unexpected intervals. Kevin Kline is an engaging actor who can play both ends of passion, the delightful and the deranged. He cannot play both simultaneously--who could?--and his character suggests two halves of an incoherent whole.

Meryl Streep's performance is a seamless, seductive piece. Sophie's past justifies Streep's familiar mannerisms: the wistful, knowing smile, the nervous fingers burrowing into a copse of hair, the starts and stops of dialogue, even the red blotches on her skin in moments of high tension. She plays Sophie in a Polish-accented contralto and, in the flashbacks, speaks serviceable Polish and German. In a smaller picture, with a lesser actress, this would seem a highfalutin stunt, a meaningless demonstration of dexterity. Here it is one more challenge that this galvanizing actress set for herself, a total immersion in character, a necessary step toward revelation. As Sophie, Streep is fine and beautiful and a little heartbreaking.

The melodrama in Frances Farmer's life was real; her tragedy was that she never got to play it onscreen. From the moment she hit Hollywood in 1935, barely 22 and with a natural blond beauty, Farmer determined to play by her own rules. She would adorn no mogul's casting couch, coddle no gossip columnist. She deserted Hollywood after her first hit movie (Come and Get It, 1936) to join the Group Theater in New York City as the star of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy. Life struck back at Frances with gaudy vengefulness. Odets and his group dumped her. She was cast in forgettable B pictures. Her caustic temper cost her: Farmer's rap sheet was soon as long as her filmography. After one pathetic performance before a California judge, she was sent to the first of an increasingly Dickensian series of asylums, undergoing shock treatment, gang rape and perhaps even a lobotomy.

Farmer has become a small industry of late--this movie, a TV biography, three off-Broadway plays and three books--but no one has been able to turn those fascinating snippets of degradation into a coherent story line. Even the can't-miss sequences (rape and lobotomy) fall flat; they don't raise hackles or sympathies. Kim Stanley has little to do as Frances' eccentric mother, and Sam Shepard is saddled with the preposterous role of Frances' mysterious friend who keeps popping up all over the West Coast whenever she needs consolation. This gifted actor-playwright should have rewritten the script, or at least read it before accepting the part.

Jessica Lange emerges more than honorably. Her face eschews classical symmetry; its bumps and crooks, its tight-dimpled smile, comment ironically on Hollywood's obsession with the Aryan ideal. But she can be, like Frances Farmer, both vulnerable and powerful. She works with a telling economy of gesture: nodding wearily as she listens to Odets' manifestoes, sucking desperately on a cigarette as if it contained the only oxygen in the room. Lange's inevitable Oscar nomination will be every bit as honestly earned as Streep's.

--By Richard Corliss

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