Silkwood **** (1983, Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, Cher) – Classic Movie Review 1869

This 1983 little gem from the late, great director Mike Nichols is a highly intelligent, high-profile real-life thriller, taken by socially concerned screenwriters Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen from the headlines of the day. Nichols said the film was being about people being asleep in their lives and waking up and saying ‘How did I get here?’

The somewhat lofty, imperious and grand star actress Meryl Streep is highly effective though she does have some trouble appearing and acting plain and ordinary as Karen Silkwood, the factory metallurgy worker who blew the whistle on the dangers at an Oklahoma plutonium processing plant in the Seventies.

[Spoiler alert] She was contaminated, psychologically abused and some say possibly murdered to prevent her from exposing blatant worker safety violations at the plant, though the circumstances of her death are still debated. The sell-line of the film gives it away: ‘On November 13 1974, Karen Silkwood, an employee of a nuclear facility, left to meet with a reporter from the New York Times. She never got there.’

Director Nichols encourages outstanding acting from the whole cast, who also include Cher as Dolly Pelliker, Kurt Russell, Craig T Nelson, Diana Scarwid, Fred Ward, Ron Silver, Josef Sommer, David Strathairn, M Emmet Walsh, Tess Harper, Charles Hallahan, Susie Bond, Henderson Forsythe, E Katherine Kerr, Bruce McGill, J C Quinn and Will Patton.

Nichols has a tendency to favour sedately paced direction, and he could have taken lessons from The China Syndrome’s urgency in telling his similar kind of tale. As with The Day of the Jackal, knowing the ending of the real-life story doesn’t spoil the suspense, tension and excitement of watching the movie. And, after all these years, this is unlikely to be a problem as few people will remember the story anyway. Though this may not be a wholly successful film, it’s a very good and important one. It was nominated for five Oscars but didn’t win a single one, though Cher won a 1984 Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe.

Streep says of Karen Silkwood: ‘She wasn’t Joan of Arc at all. She was unsavoury in some ways and yet she did some very good things. My heart breaks for her. She was only 28 or 29 when she died, and it was a real waste.’

Streep and Strathairn re-paired in The River Wild.