Word: styron
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Under frescoed portraits of Diderot and Voltaire, luminaries ranging from Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez to Novelists Norman Mailer and William Styron and Actress Sophia Loren debated such topics as state control of the arts and the unemployment crisis. In between they supped at the Foreign Ministry and lunched with Mitterrand. So dazzling was the cast that even the stars sometimes seemed overwhelmed. Said Film Director Francis Ford Coppola: "The people here are incredible. It's like a college-a very good college." The meeting, Italian Theater Director Giorgio Strehler concluded grandly in his summation, had provoked...
...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 of boxcars and starving crowds unloading for the camps, and following the heroine through years of her life...
...book, the young Southern narrator, Stingo (Peter MacNicol)--evidently based on Styron himself learns only gradually that the beautiful woman who lives upstairs in his boardinghouse is haunted by a terrible past. Extended flashbacks, shot on location in Europe with English subtitles, slowly unfold the extent of that terror up to Sophie's final and tragic "choice," so that the viewer's reactions parallel Stingo's own. Longer than the conventional flashback, these sequences demonstrate Pakula's scrupulous care in reproducing Styron's tone. An actual concentration camp in Yugoslavia forms the background, and Meryl Streep as Sophie appears with...
...Styron's book, unfortunately, is not quite a masterpiece, and from its structure come the main cracks in a movie that otherwise lawlessly accomplishes its goal. As written, the story of Stingo. Sophie and Sophie's New York lover. Nathan, is immersed in almost 600 pages of self-conscious, intellectualized ramblings on Stingo's past his guilt and his sexual frustration. This literary technique takes some of the emphasis off the actual events he confronts...
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...