David Denby

“As Karen Silkwood… Meryl Streep speaks in a coarse voice, wears her hair in a limp brown shag, and looks at men with a frankly appraising stare bordering on provocation….

“…. Silkwood suggests that this ornery, selfish, not always shrewd woman was something more interesting than a schoolbook moral hero…. In the delicate, funny, but finally terrifying and deeply moving film they have made about her, screenwriters Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen and director Mike Nichols have had the good grace not to turn her into a symbol or an abstraction.

“…. Gulled by Kerr-McGee into thinking the plant is safe, the nuclear-fuel technicians, like workers almost everywhere, get throught the day by joking and teasing and breaking into little factions and cliques. The plant is like school, and Karen is the class bad girl, loved by some and resented as a troublemaker by others.

“Mike Nichols's tense, ambitious earlier movies depended very heavily on emphatic line readings, but in his eight-year hiatus from directing movies Nichols seems to have relaxed his ideas about film acting. Many of the early scenes in Silkwood have a pleasantly disheveled comic spirit. Nichols, understands, for instance, what factory work does to people physically. At their little, isolated house, Karen, her boyfriend, Drew (Kurt Russell), and her friend Dolly--all plant workers living together--sprawl on the porch, or sit around the kitchen, too fatigued to do more than feebly nag at one another. As Drew and Karen approach bed, Nichols lets their conversation reach that peculiarly drowsy yet charged rhythm of talk before sex….

“After the leisurely, digressive early sections of the movie, the tempo gradually accelerates. The scenes become brief and violent: Nichols sends the camera racing down the nightmarish white corridors of the plant and moves in closer to Streep's anguished face….

“Too angry and stubborn to leave town, or at least proceed more cautiously, Karen pushes on and on, contaminated, possibly cancerous, and sure she that she is going to die…. Meryl Streep, white-faced and haggard, and seemingly so frightened she can barely keep her head from slumping on her chest, conveys the despair of complete isolation…. Silkwood fills us not with righteous anger but with the terror and grandeur of a heedless life turned so awkwardly and passionately toward a terrible singleness of purpose. The movie convinces us both that Karen Silkwood fulfilled her commitment and that she remained a singular and unmanageable person right down to the moment she drove herself--or was pushed--off the edge of the road and into the ditch where she died.”

David Denby
New York
Dec. 26 1983-Jan. 2, 1984