A Tissue of Implications

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SILKWOOD Directed by Mike Nichols Screenplay by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen

In the nine years since her death, it has pleased many people to think of Karen Silkwood as a sort of Joan of Arc of the nuclear age, an ignorant peasant lass who was martyred after she heeded the voice of a developing conscience and dared to point out the lack of adequate safety measures and quality controls in a plutonium-recycling plant where she was employed. This facility was owned by a corporate giant (Kerr-McGee) working under a Government contract, and Silkwood died in an auto accident on her way to show a New York Times reporter supposed documentary evidence of her charges. Thus, the possibility that someone may have murdered her in order to silence her has occurred to many on the left and among feminists, who were quick to claim Silkwood for their own. Sooner or later she was bound to become the subject of that final step in the canonization of secular saints, a major motion picture.

One rather imagines that the people who undertook this task in Silkwood may now wish they had waited until later. For rarely has the desperation to square inspirational myth with provable, nonlibelous reportage been more apparent. And rarely has the failure to do so been more dismaying. All they can say without fear of litigious contradiction is that there were obvious defects in the way

Plutonium was handled in the Crescent, Okla., plant that employed Karen Silkwood; that this woman, whom they cannot show as anything but neurotically self-centered and very messy both in her private life and in her relationship with peers and superiors at work, for reasons of her own decided to take a leading role in her union's campaign to remedy these defects; that thereafter she began to suffer from radioactive contamination, which may have been caused by someone in the company, but could possibly have been self-induced; that on the night of Nov. 13,1974, she lost control of her car and crashed into a wall (the only concrete object in this case) with instantly fatal results.

What they cannot say, however, is whether the working conditions under protest were the result of deliberate policy or middle-management bungling of an unmalicious kind. Nor can they identify a moment when Silkwood made a conscious commitment to a coherent program of opposition to the status quo, which would, naturally, have included a knowing (and thus heroic) acceptance of the risks she might possibly be taking. Shorn of the ability to make direct statements on these matters, the film, in its climactic accident, is robbed of its capacity either to instruct or to move. Unable to prove a corporate conspiracy against Silkwood, or even individual violence by someone whose job was threatened by investigations, the movie must content itself with showing, without comment, mysterious headlights appearing behind her car just before the crash. And then admit, on a concluding title card, that an autopsy revealed a large amount of tranquilizers as well as a small amount of alcohol in the system of this demonstrably unstable woman. This is the most significant set of contradictory implications in a movie that is a tissue of them. And they leave the viewer about where he began, free to consult his own paranoia, or lack of it, for an interpretation of her life and death.

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 This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.