Most people who will be interested in a movie about the anti-nuke martyr, Karen Silkwood, will be braced for the end. The more interested among them, however, would do well to brace themselves additionally for the tiptoeing -- or ought that to be pussyfooting? -- around the hard issues en route to that end, as though the overriding issue were the avoidance of litigation. Here we encounter one of the eternal pitfalls of taking a movie too directly from real life, especially from a life so open to dispute. In order, perhaps, to compensate for their reticence about the content of that life, the moviemakers have chosen to play up the superficial "realness" of it. And as scripted by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen and directed by Mike Nichols, the movie is keenly observant about the texture of working-class existence, the dreary routine at a plutonium processing plant, the not always harmonious relations between co-workers, the housing, the not always harmonious relations between housemates, including one of the more individual lesbian relationships seen on screen. But it would not be inappropriate to suggest that there is something ornamental about all this -- just as long as that's not misunderstood to mean beautifying, prettifying, cosmeticizing. The movie never gets below, never takes shape beneath, its naturalistic surface. And here we come upon a wider and deeper pitfall of movies taken from real life: the resistance of such life -- or of this life, anyway -- to submit to narrative form. With Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, and Cher. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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