OVP: Silkwood (1983)

Film: Silkwood (1983)
Stars: Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, Cher, Craig T. Nelson
Director: Mike Nichols
Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Director, Actress-Meryl Streep, Supporting Actress-Cher, Original Screenplay, Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I do adore Meryl Streep, this is a true statement.  But on occasion I do miss her a little bit.  The reality is, for those who have grown up with a Devil Wears Prada-style Meryl that the Grand Lady of American Cinema wasn't always so stylized in her work on the screen.  Yes, there's little doubt that the past decade has been terrific for Streep, and that she's managed to parlay her work into being a movie star for a new generation, but it's worth remembering that she used to be a more naturalistic performer.  When Streep rose to prominence, there was such a sense of excitement around her, and the way that she could inhabit characters and create these deeply real, fleshed-out human beings.  She also, and this seems a bit harsh, used to be in better movies.  Perhaps few have been as good, though, as Silkwood, her 1983 drama about the life of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear whistleblower and labor activist from the 1970's.  The film, over thirty years old now, still feels fresh and relevant, a near-impossible coup for an issue film, but Mike Nichols and Streep herself aid this with bravura acting and a script that is more about human ignorance and bullying against a crusader than a specific issue.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Karen (Streep), in many ways in the same vein as Erin Brockovich who would succeed her.  She's not a great mother (her children don't even live with her, a less forgivable reality in 1983 than today, but the indictment still rings the same), she is sexually promiscuous at work (she flashes a coworker in a crowded room), and she seems to just sort of skate by with an okay performance while claiming she's doing a great job (we all know that person at work).  She works, however, at a nuclear plant, and is frequently dealing with issues of nuclear safety.  The film features the famed Silkwood shower scenes, where after nuclear exposure a person (in this case, frequently Streep) has to endure a harsh, rough shower and forced scrubbing from coworkers in order to "prevent" radiation from the plutonium.

The film is certainly at its best when it focuses on Streep and her role as an unlikely crusader.  One of the more interesting points of the film that separates it from other "unlikely crusader" style films is the way that they don't point out how odd it is that Karen, who hasn't seemed to care about anything but herself before this fight, is the one doing it.  Karen Silkwood doesn't have her "come to Jesus" moment, and in many ways is doing this to save herself and find purpose in her life rather than initially as a safety precaution for her fellow workers.  Still, the way the script unfolds around her becomes even more haunting as the film progresses, as thirty years later we have a sense of the lies that she was being told, and the ways that the the plant would eventually go belly-up in the wake of her death due to the misplaced plutonium.  Watching her coworkers use arguments like "I want to keep my job" and "it's fine the way it is" are scary not only because you know they're essentially in the building that is guaranteeing their death, but because you see that sort of ignorance still today, where people claim climate change can't be real not because of the science but more because "it would cost jobs" and "it's too expensive."  A lot of the film, quite frankly, resonated with me as a climate change crusader, and I felt that you could pretty easily bring the entire story to the present day without much issue in that regard, which is petrifying.

The film received five Academy Award nominations, with Streep positioned best-of-all in the bunch.  There's something so mesmerizing about Streep in the early-1980's, watching the way that she doesn't dumb down her performance, the way she's so on in every scene.  In many ways her work here recalls Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln and There Will Be Blood in the way that she abandons any sense of the movie star behind the work, instead just becoming an iconic character.  I feel like in some ways, despite some really amazing work since, she hasn't done that in modern memory in quite the same way since Miranda Priestly.  Cher, gaining her first experience of "serious" acting, is fine but not in the same league as Streep's lesbian best friend-she and Kurt Russell both have their moments (I love the question mark that Cher leaves on her character, whether or not she sold her out in order to keep her job), but really they just sort of our sidelined by Streep's outstanding work (Kurt Russell was definitely a dish in this movie, though, it's worth saying).  Mike Nichols' directing is taut and clear as always-he keeps slightly extended-shots when he needs it, and the ending is filmed with just enough malice to get across his opinion of what happened to Karen Silkwood without legal being involved.  Combined with Nora Ephron's succinct script, the film is certainly well-done.  The movie might have a tad bit of sprucing up of the supporting characters (I particularly never quite got what was going on with Craig T. Nelson), but that's a pretty quiet quibble for such a film.

Those are my thoughts on this movie-what about yours?  Are you with me that Silkwood still feels remarkably prescient today?  Do you occasionally miss the Meryl of yore?  And considering she had an amazing cast of Debra Winger, Julie Walters, Jane Alexander, and the victorious Shirley MacLaine competing against her in 1983, do you think she deserved that Oscar?