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If Silkwood aspired merely to documentary honesty, this approach would be entirely honorable, perhaps even praiseworthy. But it will not do for a film that feels a powerful obligation to politicized mythmaking and must, in any case, try to involve the audience at a more intense and immediate dramatic, emotional and intellectual level. The strategy, therefore, is to treat the particulars of its heroine's political activities and her death almost as irrelevancies. The important thing, we are supposed to believe, is that Silkwood somehow redeemed an inconsequential life, a life the film makers are at pains to treat disdainfully, by a miraculous, inexplicable focusing of her energies on a significant issue of social conscience in its final months. Again, this is not an interpretation proved by any of the facts the film can set forth. So Nichols starts sneaking in the strains of Amazing Grace over his concluding images, and they swell mightily over the end credits.
Amazing grace, indeed, that saved a wretch like the one we are shown. And amazing (if possibly unconscious) patronization on the part of the film's creators. There is none of the affectionate respect for working-class life and values that marked the similar, and far superior, Norma Rae, nor any of that film's sense of felt reality either. One senses that Nichols and his colleagues are reporting on a sociological field trip, that they made no instinctive emotional connections with Silkwood's milieu.
This is a criticism one extends to Meryl Streep in the title role. She is an actress of calculated effects, which work well when she is playing self-consciously intelligent women. But interpreting a character who abandoned three children, shares a house with a rather shiftless boyfriend and a lesbian (Kurt Russell and Cher, both of whom are easier and more naturalistic performers) and shows her contempt for Authority by flashing a bare breast at its representative, she seems at once forced and pulled back.
But the entire film has that air about it, caught as it is in a double bind. The facts it can lay its hands on do not support a politically alarming or dramatically compelling conclusion to the mysteries of this case. Nor do they lead to a very uplifting statement about the motives and character of its central figure. On the other hand, the passage of time has not yet burnished away the ambiguities surrounding this affair, which might have permitted a purely mythic, Gandhi-like approach. In short, the moviemakers are backed into a corner from which neither show-biz sophistry nor a resort to the kind of radical-chic attitudes Nichols has always favored, nor yet a hundred hymns, can lift them. The final unspoken implication of this film is that Karen Silkwood's tragedy lay in the fact that she was cut down just short of the point at which she would have attained that truly amazing state of grace where she would have become a suitable speaker for fund raisers in the Hamptons or Beverly Hills. The humblest among us deserves a better apotheosis than that. —By Richard Schickel