Russell has become a star with the looks of a leading man and the substance and wit of a character player. After his years with Walt Disney and then in action-adventure films (''Escape from New York,'' ''The Thing''), Mr. That popularity begins to vanish, though, when she joins the battle over safety conditions. At one point the more or less menage a trois becomes four when they are joined by Dolly's newest lover, Angela (Diana Scarwid), who works as a beautician in a funeral parlor.Īt the plant, Karen takes no lip from the company bosses and sounds off noisily about love, sex and whatever else that comes to mind, to the shocked delight of her more conservative co-workers. She shares a ramshackle house with her current lover, Drew (Kurt Russell), who's just as casual in his attachments as she is in hers, and with her best friend Dolly Pelliker (Cher), a practicing lesbian. ![]() In the small-town atmosphere of Crescent, Miss Streep's Karen is, for understandable reasons, notorious. However, until these closing scenes, in which ''Amazing Grace,'' heard on the soundtrack, is used as if it were caulking to plug the holes in a leaky boat, ''Silkwood'' is a very moving work about the raising of the consciousness of one woman of independence, guts and sensitivity. Nichols and his writers attempt to acknowledge most of these theories and, in so doing, end their film in utter confusion. They speculate further that her contaminations were, in fact, not accidents but self-inflicted, in a misguided attempt to dramatize the true gravity of conditions at the Cimarron facility, which, subsequently, was shut down. There are others who are convinced that her car crash was an accident, caused by her known use of tranquilizers and pain killers. At this point she had become almost as unpopular with many employees, who didn't want to lose their jobs, as she was with management. On the night of the car crash, she was driving alone to Oklahoma City to meet David Burnham, a reporter for The New York Times, to tell her story.īecause of these circumstances, there are those who contend that she was murdered to keep her silent. At the time of her death, she was alleged to have gathered evidence that would force the plant to close. One result was that she threw herself into union work and was herself ''contaminated'' by radioactive materials, though in ways that have never been satisfactorily explained. At the same time, she grew increasingly troubled by the sloppy safety conditions under which she and the other Cimarron employees worked when handling dangerous, highly radioactive plutonium. She lived for a while with a young co-worker named Drew Stephens and was known to drink and to pop pills. At Cimarron, she earned a reputation as someone who couldn't be pushed around. This much about Karen Silkwood's life apparently is not in dispute: She was born in Texas, went through one year of college and had three children by a common-law husband, whom she left when she moved to Crescent, Okla., to work in Kerr-McGee's Cimarron Plutonium Recycling Facility there. It's a brassy, profane, gum-chewing tour de force, as funny as it is moving. ![]() Her portrait of the initially self-assured and free-living, then radicalized and, finally, terrified Karen Silkwood is unlike anything she's done to date, except in its intelligence. Kramer'' and her second for ''Sophie's Choice,'' Miss Streep looks to be on what the Las Vegas people call ''a roll.'' Having won her first Oscar for ''Kramer vs. ''Silkwood,'' which opens today at Loew's Tower East, also offers another stunning performance by Meryl Streep, who plays the title role. Nichols has yet done in films, and that would include ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,'' ''The Graduate'' and ''Catch-22.'' Perhaps for the first time in a popular movie has America's petrochemical-nuclear landscape been dramatized, and with such anger and compassion. Though far from perfect, ''Silkwood'' may be the most serious work Mr. ![]() TAKING many of the facts of the life of Karen Silkwood, the young laboratory worker and union activist who, in 1974, died in an automobile crash that some believe to have been murder, Mike Nichols has directed a precisely visualized, highly emotional melodrama that's going to raise a lot of hackles.
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