I have to say, this two and a half hour movie was not what I expected. It was slow and long and so incredibly slow. I understand parts of why it was a good movie, but the choice she had to make seemed a little dulled by the abusive relationship she is in. I wanted so much for Sophie to choose life, choose her happiness, choose trying again, but she doesn't.
Okay, so I know some people will ask, but the choice she had to make, how could that not have destroyed her? She had reasons to stay with Nathan, she was broken, she was alone. She didn't know who to trust. She didn't know how to live. She was only in America because it was safe at that moment. Yet I have to ask, there were a lot of people who did an did not survive the holocaust, there were a lot of people who did whatever they could to survive, so why was Sophie so unwilling to keep living and trying to live?
Could it have been what we now call PTSD? Was it guilt? Did she think she wasn't worth it? There was so much unexplained drama, that it was difficult to care about the relationships. I wanted to like SOPHIE'S CHOICE, but to get to that point of the movie, I had to watch two hours of a relationship I didn't care about, nor did I care about what was going to happen in the relationship. I don't watch movies with abusive relationships very often, because it bothers me, for personal reasons. If I had known that this was more about the relationship between Sophie, Nathan, and Stingo, I probably wouldn't have watched it.
It wasn't a bad movie, and I can't comment on it like I would do in a normal review, because how do you critique a movie that involves any part of the holocaust? Unless it is a glorification of Hitler, you can't really. So this is all I have to say. It was long, and slow.