Letter Perfect

IT'S BEEN A 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 of boxcars and starving crowds unloading for the camps, and following the heroine through years of her life.

As in the 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 near-shaven head, made up to look perceptibly younger and gabbling fluently in German and Polish.

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.

The film's ability to bypass all this does wonders for the tale's drama and digestibility. But it also tends to turn marginal implausibilities most glaringly, the life led by the pivotal character. Nathan, played by Kevin Kline--into enigmas that strain the viewer's credibility. And the one scene that returns focus entirely to Stingo--a ludicrous unsuccessful sexual conquest--seems oddly out of place.

SUCH GAPS DISTRACT from what is otherwise an overwhelming flood of color and emotion. Streep, Kline and MacNicol, all marvels of casting, create a triangle of almost staggering chemistry. While the abrupt revelation that Nathan is a schizophrenic--crucial to the plot--does not satisfactorily account for Kline's flamboyant magnetism, that magnetism nevertheless is riveting. Kline apes MacNicol's Southern accent and frolics through extravagant pranks and outings while Streep watches him in mute, almost abject admiration: not a flicker of an eyelid spoils the effect.

Expertise, then, becomes the dominant impression of the film--expertise in taking on an unquestionably ambitious cinematic goal and then meeting it with a flourish. Faithfulness to the novel only accentuates the point. Much has been made of the perfectionism with which Streep attacked the demanding role of Sophie, breaking out of her previous understated image into rampant emotionalism, and perfecting the heavy Polish accent and halting speech that make the illusion complete. Likewise, it is difficult for even the queasiest to fault Pakula's respectful and sensitive handling of the Holocaust material.

Besides the long flashbacks, there is nothing particularly experimental about the filming itself. The friendship between Stingo and the couple, for instance, develops through a fairly traditional quick succession of lyrical scenes--the three dancing, picnicking on the Hudson, whirling through Coney Island, walking to the top of a floodlit bridge. The sex scenes are carefully elliptical--more so than the book and the Auschwitz sequence, while suggesting horrors, discreetly avoids trying to show the unspeakable. The score is as lush as scenery and plot. The near-perfection with which everything fits together, technically and artistically, may be what's responsible for the slight sense of distance that hangs over this trio's tortured Gothic emotions. But of course, perfection being what it is, that sense doesn't keep Sophie's Choice from delivering the emotional wallop that it carries.