I say, yes!
Listen to Hamlisch’s score to Sophie’s Choice (1982), and then to Howard’s score to The Prince of Tides (1991). If you want more of a sampling of Hamlisch, you’ll have to go to Youtube, because the mook who posted the longer version, John Steven Lasher, is a shmuck from Jump Street. And yes, that is based on personal experience. Lasher likes to pick fights with commenters on his threads, and then delete their comments.
Sophie’s Choice was the story of a love triangle between “Stingo,” the young Southerner starting a life for himself as a writer in New York City, Nathan, the brilliant, magnetic, Jewish paranoid-schizophrenic, and Sophie, the Polish Catholic who had had her children murdered by the Nazis.
Sophie’s Choice was based on the eponymous, 1979, paint-by-the-numbers novel by William Styron, which had won a heap of awards.
Paint-by-the-numbers means that Styron inserted different items for parts of White, liberal audiences, or even different compartments of the same readers. There was the “civil rights” insert, where he misrepresents the murder of Emmett Till. Then there was the Holocaust piece, except that here Styron was more inventive and dishonest. Sophie was the daughter of a reactionary but anti-Nazi professor. She was also arrested by the Nazis, who before putting her on a cattle car to Auschwitz, made her choose between her two children (neither of whom would survive the Holocaust).
There was no basis in reality for the situation Styron depicted. This was an early case in which novelists, fake journalists, and fake historians claimed that non-Jews had it as bad with the Nazis as the Jews did.
The worst thing about the novel, I found, was Styron’s habit of telling what he was supposed to be showing. Instead of showing Sophie feeling tears well up, he would say, “Sophie felt like crying.”
And it goes on forever!
The movie’s great strength was Meryl Streep’s performance, which won her her second Oscar.
Notwithstanding James Newton Howard’s rip-off of Marvin Hamlisch, The Prince of Tides (1991) was far and away the masterpiece of 1991. I have yet to read the Pat Conroy novel it was based on. In 1988, the NJG worshiped that book. The Prince of Tides is the story of a family’s secrets. Barbra Streisand opens the picture with Nolte’s voice-over during a stunning shot of three children running off a dock and, under the water, holding hands while looking at each other, before coming back to the surface. That’s to embody the intense bond between them. But the bonds are broken, with one child dead (Chris Stacy), another having attempted suicide (Melinda Dillon), and the third (Nick Nolte) in the throes of a mid-life crisis. A psychologist (Streisand) must put together the pieces of the Wingo family puzzle.
And yes, there is a Holocaust angle, and it is very inventive but not in a phony way.
The picture should have won at least five Oscars: For Best Picture (Streisand and Andrew Karsch) and Best Director (Streisand, who wasn’t even nominated); best adapted screenplay (Pat Conroy and Becky Johnston); Best Actor (Nick Nolte); and Best Editing (Don Zimmerman).
That Streisand didn’t get nominated for Best Director, was due not to sexism, but to the personal hatred that her Jewish colleagues in the academy had for her, in spite of agreeing with her politically, and attending the same parties with her.
I have The Prince of Tides on my list of the 100 Greatest Pictures of All Time, at #96. While Prince was nominated for seven Oscars, it didn’t win a single one. Instead, the Academy had a love fest with Jonathan Demme’s serial killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs, granting it four Oscars—in all the major categories.
Sophie’s Choice: Love Theme
Suite of James Newton Howard’s Score to The Prince of Tides (1991)
No comments:
Post a Comment