Word: pakula
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...WHILE since the last time anyone tried to make a movie in the style of Sophie's Choice a sweeping, panoramic, more-than-full-length feature patterned with word-for-word faithfulness on a bestselling epic. The classic of the genre is, of course, Gone With the Wind. Alan Pakula's new film has much of the grandness and majestic scope of such predecessors Based on the long-time 1980 bestseller by William Styron, which attempted to make some kind of comprehensive statement about the naive American outsider and the Holocaust, the movie progresses through Poland and Auschwitz, showing clips...
SOPHIE'S CHOICE Directed and Written by Alan J. Pakula FRANCES Directed by Graeme Clifford; Screenplay by Eric Bergren, Christopher DeVore and Nicholas Kazan...
...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...
...less secure director than Alan Pakula might have succumbed to the temptation to rush through the financial pages of his script in order to get on with the elements of murder, mystery and romance. But as he has proved in films like Klute and All the President's Men, Pakula is a true stylist, a man who sees the world through a slow-panning lens darkly. For him, the corridors of power are menacingly dim and hushed, and by forcing the audience to dwell on his paranoid vision of that maze, the director commands a certain sober respect...
...just does not wash. One is left with a succession of classy, spooky images, a titillated but unsatisfied imagination and the feeling that there is both less and more here than met Pakula's excellent eye. -By Richard Schickel