Movie Review – Sophie’s Choice (Is Choice Really Free Will?)

The movie Sophie’s Choice tells the story of Sophie’s tragic choice in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II and the lifelong guilt that followed. Through the horrors of war and human powerlessness, the movie provokes deep reflection on the meaning of true choice.

 

Life is often said to be a series of choices. This is meant to emphasize the importance of an individual’s attitude and will in determining the course of his or her life. We want to be able to make choices rather than be chosen. But are we really living our lives by our own choice and will?
The movie Sophie’s Choice, based on the 1979 novel by William Styron, poignantly depicts the horrors of war, the tragedy of the individual, and the powerlessness of one person in the face of the larger forces of history and time through the irreparable wounds of a woman named Sophie.
It is 1947, two years after the end of World War II, and the film is narrated by Stingo, a young man from the American South. He comes to New York City with dreams of becoming a novelist, and while looking for a cheap apartment in Brooklyn, he meets and befriends Polish Sophie and Jewish Nathan. While staying with the lovers, Stingo learns about Sophie’s past. She lost her father and husband to the Nazis’ genocidal policies and was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. After the war, she is sent to a refugee camp in Sweden, where she attempts suicide, but is rescued and immigrates to the United States, where she meets and falls in love with Nathan. Stingo harbors feelings for Sophie, but does not express his feelings to her while she is with Nathan. But when Nathan, who suffers from bipolar disorder, leaves her, Stingo asks her to leave New York and start a new life together. Later, Sophie confides in Stingo about her horrific experiences in Auschwitz.

 

 

Sophie was actually with her two children on her way to the camp. A German officer, attracted by her beauty, forces her to make a terrible choice: she can only keep one child alive. In her desperation, Sophie ultimately chooses to send her daughter to the gas chambers, a decision that would haunt her for the rest of her life. It’s a wound that will haunt her forever and never heal.
The movie ends with Sophie rejecting Stingo’s proposal of marriage, returning to Nathan and choosing to commit suicide by poisoning herself. Sophie’s final choice is not a peaceful life with Stingo, but death with Nathan. Perhaps this was the only choice she could make in the face of an unhealable wound.
In one scene in the movie, when Stingo asks Sophie what her religion is, she replies that she used to be Catholic but no longer believes. What does God mean to Sophie, who has lost her father, her husband, and one of her two children to death? Christianity tells us that God loves and cares for us, but for Sophie, God was like a parent who abandoned her. In the midst of war and tragedy, she could only despair, and not even God could save her from her suffering.
At the beginning of the movie, Stingo confesses that before he met Sophie and Nathan, he was a young man ignorant of love and death. Perhaps for the same reason, I am still left with questions about Sophie’s life and her final choice. There are no easy answers, but I wonder if I would see this movie differently with the passage of time and a deeper understanding of life? In fact, not only Sophie, but all of us are forced to make choices in the face of great forces. Human reason makes society progress and history move forward, but sometimes the will or attitude of an individual seems so powerless.
Despite the movie’s long running time of two and a half hours, the story of Sophie, Nathan, and Stingo unfolds in a cohesive manner. Meryl Streep’s powerful performance is one of the movie’s biggest draws. The message of war’s madness, brutality, and human loss is heartbreakingly conveyed through the story of Sophie, and it provokes deep reflection on love, life, and death.
More than just depicting the brutality of war, the movie makes us realize how weak and helpless we are as human beings. At the same time, it reminds us of the real choices we have in our lives and what they mean.