Word: silkwoods
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SILKWOOD is a devastatingly lyrical film about the mysterious death of anti-nuclear activist Karen Silkwood on November 13, 1974. The film carefully weaves together Silkwood's sheltered life as a technician at a nuclear power plant, her relationships with her boyfriend, lesbian roommate, and fellow workers, and her burgeoning disgruntlement with the safety conditions of the pleat...
Based on the obscure, reconstructed facts of her life, the movie documents Silkwood's story vividly, drawing in its wake a stunning depletion of the squalid life in her southern Oklahoma town, and graphic details of routine abuses at a nuclear power plant. It successfully avoids over-romanticizing Silkwood's role as a pseudo-reactionary, instead presenting the material without a slant while filling the plot with amazing detail and brittle, yet good natured humor...
Meryl Streep effortlessy recreates Karen Silkwood as the simple, not-too-intelligent woman she most likely was: a woman who naively begins to fight corruption without ever grasping the magnitude of her struggle. Like her stunning Academy Award winning performance in Sophie's Choice, Streep delves wholeheartedly into her role, displaying nuances and foibles that make Silkwood believable. We feel her physical revulsion when she gets brutally showered and scrubbed after receiving radiation contamination; we see her go through the motions of a rather doldrum life, confront her roommate's homosexuality, and unconsciously adapt to the volatile world of union...
...STREE'S Silkwood fits right into the dry, voidless landscape of her cheaply furnished house. Her red hair, compulsive cigarette smoking and good-natured rambunctiousness are charming, and we gradually accept her character for what she is, not what she could be if she ignored the corruption and raised her three children from a common-law marriage who live with their father. Streep plays well off the other characters, featuring her rugged live-in boyfriend Drew (Kurt Russell) and her bizarre, sexually frustrated roommate Dolly (Cher). Both Russell and Cher turn in excellent performances, overcoming past stereotypes--Russell...
...neutron absorber. Who the hell wants it? I've got twelve or so 400-channel analyzers. Stacks of nuclear-instrumentation modules. IBM card punches and readers-obsolete by our standards. But if a country has nothing? Scintillation crystals. Electronic balances." Grothus supplied the technical props for the Karen Silkwood movie. He was horrified when they were returned. "You can't get rid of this stuff," he moans. "Do you need a five-beam oscilloscope? Nobody on earth has as much stuff as I do, and I'm not sure technology has any value at all." He pauses...