Silkwood (1983)

Silkwood (1983) is another one in a long line of Meryl Streep movies I'm going to have to review but without much joy. However, unlike the recently reviewed Still of the Night, this movie is actually quite good.

The biggest problem is that it has long patches of being too slow and too quiet. The biggest plus is that there are moments of real emotional power - surprisingly forceful.

The movie, despite being made in 1983, "feels" like so many biopic movies of everyday people that came to prominence in the late '70s and early '80s - movies like Norma Rae and Coal Miner's Daughter. It has much less of the 1980's culture in it than most of the films on this blog, and much more of the 1970's. 

It's about Karen Silkwood, a nuclear fuel plant worker in Oklahoma who slowly, surely becomes convinced the company she works for is not just breaking rules, it's killing people more or less deliberately to maximize profit. And she sets out to stop them in the only way a poor woman in 1970's Oklahoma can - by making it public via stolen documents. In many ways this movie is the dark side of Norma Rae with Sally Field. You leave the film absolutely convinced that Karen was murdered (not a spoiler, it's declared right on the movie's poster). 

Streep is less egregiously "ACTING" as Karen than in most of her roles. In many scenes she even seems like a completely natural woman. And at other times I feel I can watch her putting on her persona right in front of me. But the best scenes are the ones with Cher and Kurt Russell, her housemate and lover, respectively. They are very natural actors, especially Russell, and you can tell Streep has to really tone it down to not seem overly formal in front of them. Craig T. Nelson is also noteworthy has a rather dim plant worker who is not on her side. 

The plot is chilling, and it's underpinned by the many scenes where people are contaminated "externally" and forced to undergo horrific forced scrubbing sessions in the shower to remove any lingering plutonium. Awful to watch. 

The villainous people working for the plant are appropriately heinous, but like most movies of this kind, they are completely unidimensional. Obviously in real life (I would hope) the decision to alter negatives of defects is not made lightly ... here it's never given a second thought that these monsters would do something like that. 

The director was Mike Nichols, who you  might know from his films Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Catch-22, Working Girl, Postcards from the Edge, and most recently Charlie Wilson's War. Long career, well regarded. He considers this his first film in a more naturalist style of directing, which I think it's safe to interpret as "just going with the flow." 

The screenwriter is the late Nora Ephron, who is most famously responsible for the terrific script to When Harry Met Sally... along with a few other notable rom-coms in the same vein like Sleepless in Seattle. 

I don't know how much it cost to make, but it was a big hit and grossed $36 million when the dust settled. That is very very good in 1983 dollars. It's rather long - two hours and ten minutes, much of it very slow - but worth catching if you happen across it.