Stanley Kauffmann

“Meryl Streep, as Karen Silkwood, drove her car through the gate of the plant where she worked, parked, then headed across the lost toward her job; and I felt snug. Silkwood was going to be all right. In those first ordinary actions, Streep had once again done the miraculous, which is the daily work of fine actors: she had changed the unchangeable. When I last saw her, in Sophie's Choice, the core of Sophie had been innate, immutable. Now she has transmuted to another immutable.

“Streep does not let us down. But the film does, badly…. What seems numbed in Silkwood is what Nichols brought with him to films: his theatrical sense of dialogue--its rhythms and timing--which was exquisite. This film labors under longeurs, not of windy dialogue but of wind between the lines that bloats the film. No character can ask another to have a beer without enough time lapsing before the answer in which to drink the whole damned beer…. About twenty of the film's 128 minutes could have been eliminated by picking up cues, and the result would not have betrayed the idiomatic pace of the characters' speech. As is, the pace gets so draggy that it reflects on the actors. Audiences may think that Streep and colleagues are less gripping than they ought to be when the flaw is really Nichols's "conducting."

“….. Some published accounts indicate that facts about Silkwood's private life have been altered to make her more popularly acceptable and that her experiences in the plant, with safety practices and radiation tests, have been nudged a bit one way and another.

“All these changes verge on the unethical, the deliberately misleading. E. L. Doctorow altered facts in the Rosenberg case for his novel The Book of Daniel, but he made no claim to be presenting that case factually…. The film does indeed show her growing awareness of her social situation and its connection with the physical condition caused by making her job, but this is not the same as making her something akin to a labor Joan of Arc.”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, Jan. 23, 1984
Field of View, pp 238-239
[re-read whole review]