Silkwood

Karen Silkwood died in a car wreck in 1974 on her way to meet with a New York Times reporter after discovering shoddy conditions in the nuclear factory in which she worked. Silkwood may have had documentation that would have proven a cover-up of the dangerously inadequate workplace. She definitely had traces of tranquilizers and alcohol in her system. It has been suggested that foul play may have been involved in her death, but to this day, the mysterious questions surrounding her fatal crash remain unsolved.

Those facts are on file, and Silkwood does nothing to alter them. Nor does it suggest an answer to the mystery surrounding Silkwood’s death. What this movie does is provide a vivid and moving story of human being caught in the middle of something much bigger than herself. By avoiding the political soapbox in favor of the personal story, Silkwood is extremely effective in bringing us deeply into the lives of its characters. Sometimes there’s a temptation to give real-life martyrs a halo for good behavior. The people of Silkwood remain steadfastly down-to-earth – even ordinary.

Karen (Meryl Streep) works in a plutonium plant in Oklahoma, as do her roommates: her lover Drew (Kurt Russell) and best friend Dolly (Cher). They’re normal people – not terribly gifted or bright, but good to be around, and good to observe, as the film uncondescendingly does. The only really unusual aspect of their lives is their workplace.

Most people know what it’s like to work at an average 9-to-5 job: you punch the clock, work hard, tell jokes, gossip about your fellow workers. That’s just the way director Mike Nichols presents the plutonium workers in Silkwood. The work is run-of-the-mill.

The chilling difference becomes apparent when somebody messes up. In most jobs, when you foul up, you get scolded, and you go back to work.

Nichols and company have brilliantly captured the sense of the extraordinary – these people are working in and around radiation, for God’s sakes – made ordinary by repetition. It’s a way to make ends meet, after all.

The grungy, funky lifestyle of the three main characters fits in perfectly against this matter-of-fact backdrop. They work most of the time; but when they’re at home, they laze around, inhale beer and cigarettes, make love. Much of our involvement with them springs out of the film’s healthy sense of humor, which is nicely balanced throughout.

Typical of this is the treatment of Dolly’s lesbianism, which is revealed in a scene in which her beautician friend (Diana Scarwid) moves in with her. Drew and Karen gamely try to be free-thinking about this – “I say that as long as they’re happy, they’re fine,” he says, and Karen chimes in with, “Well, that’s what I say” – and you can see from the looks on their faces that they’re both completely bewildered. The scene is both funny and tender.

Silkwood becomes gripping as our heroine starts to awaken to the dangerous and illegal practices at the plant. She joins a union committee and tries to help organize the workers. At the same time, she is transferred and subtly discredited at work – and finally contaminated, just before she prepares to gather the evidence that would prove that safety reports were being doctored.

There’s a lot of movie here, and it is very well done – perhaps most satisfyingly on the basic level of a good story well told. All the acting is fine; Streep does her customarily superb work, and Russell is appropriately hunky. In fact, the production is marked by a level of commitment rarely found these days. We’re only halfway through the Christmas movie season, but right now, Silkwood is the one to see.

First published in The Herald, December 1983

Not a very good review for a good movie, and I’m not sure what my workplace obsession is about, except that I was actually working a 9-to-5 job (really 8-to-5) at the time, along with writing movie reviews. How did I not talk more about Cher?