Brother pages: It's like there's two sides of you. One side is a bitch who flashes people and the other one is like you are right now and I love her.
There are spoilers below the cut.
You paged Brother with: Thinking about it, I wonder if Silkwood was ever originally intended to be a miniseries.
You paged Brother with: As you say, there seems to be a lot left unsaid and undone on screen.
Brother pages: Maybe. I didn't get that vibe. I just got the feeling it was one of those movies where they were trying to get as much in as possible. Like the stuff at the plant. Karen never really discovers anything on screen except for the doctored x-rays. Everything is just boom boom boom mentioned.
Long distance to Brother: Looking at the summary on Wikipedia, they mention Karen suspecting poor safety for the workers along with the doctored x-rays. But was poor safety ever mentioned? When Karen recieves her massive contamination, the immediate conclusion is that it was deliberate, not a matter of poor safety.
Brother pages: Again, it was alluded to in brief comments. The lack of showers, the one kid getting dumped with radioactive crap while working on a drain. It's mentioned briefly, but Mike Nichols stays pretty firmly on the conspiracy against Karen track.
Brother pages: One of the things I did like about the second half is the change of seasons.
Brother pages: Winter is coming.
You paged Brother with: I noticed that as well. Good attention to detail there.
You paged Brother with: Part of a review on Wikipedia that is spot on: 'We are drawn into the story of Karen Silkwood by the absolute accuracy and unexpected sweetness of its Middle American details and then, near the end, abandoned by a film whose images say one thing and whose final credit card another.'
You paged Brother with: It is implied that Karen was run off the road somehow and then the movie cops out and admits no one knows what really happened or if Karen had documents or not.
Brother pages: Well, as far as the second point, I can understand that as far as the world of the movie. Karen kept flaking out on getting the documents. Was she just going to walk in and steal them? But in the real world, people testified that she had documents with her when she was at the meeting before going to meet the reporter.
Brother pages: In my opinion, Nichols failed to end the movie appropriately.
Brother pages: Nichols should have had headlines appear ominiously, but not get close. And then that would be the end of the movie with no shot of the car being towed past the cafe or an epilogue card with info.
Brother pages: You know what the first half of the movie reminded me of?
Brother pages: Five Easy Pieces. And then in the second half, when Dolly wants to move someplace 'clean', just like the girls Jack and Karen Black pick up on the highway.
Brother pages: White trash living out in the middle of nowhere working at blue collar jobs.
Brother pages: A flawed movie.
Brother pages: Have you seen the movie with Cate Blanchett as the Irish reporter who is killed by the mob?
Brother pages: That movie has similarities to Silkwood as far as the performance of the would-be heroine.
Brother pages: A heroine, out to expose people, who is kind of oblivious to the damage it is doing around her. Cate's movie is criticized heavily for how she just seems to totally ignore the fact her life is serious danger due to mob threats to her and her family.
Brother pages: Karen is the same way as far as her home life, but she is radicalized, but it's not played out on screen, as you say in your review.
Brother pages: Wow!
Brother pages: Nichols totally underplays the crash.
Brother pages:
Brother pages: That's another detail that frustrated me.
Brother pages: Karen picks up her cough and it becomes more frequent in the second half, but no one ever notices. What a waste of a fine detail.
You paged Brother with: I would bet the cough was all Meryl.
Brother pages: Maybe so, but if it was her, she should have dropped it. It was pointless and created a plot hole.
Brother pages: It's like Chekhov's Gun. If it's on the wall and remains unused, there's no point in including it in the first place.
Brother pages: I wonder if Mike was really going for leaving it all up to the audience to draw inferences. For instance, the first time Karen is cooked, she is seen eating cake off the floor of the work room and then later she is using the vac. Are we to assume there were shavings down there she first ingested and then stirred up with the vac and breathed in?
Brother pages: Later it is driven home that Kerr McGee is contaminating Karen to discredit her and/or kill her. But the first time she is cooked and then before when Thelma is cooked, it's never showed just how safety standards have been trampled on or if they even were.
Brother pages: It's like, OMG, I'm cooked!
Brother pages: And and and, the very first thing, with the company trying to pin the contamination of the work room on Karen because she wanted the weekend off so bad, I mean, really, they really are that vicious over a girl who wants the weekend off to go visit her kids? And then after, they DON'T fire her? Jeez.
Brother pages: And again, why is the workroom contaminted? Was it a fuck up by one of the others? Was it poor safety standards? The string of contaminations and people getting cooked are never brought together to show a pattern.
Brother pages: The ONLY point driven home throughout the entire movie is the lack of literature given out by the company on the dangers of plutonium.
Brother pages: In the scene where Karen goes to see her friends and no one wants to talk to her.
Brother pages: Were they turned against her? I got a feeling that they were intimidated.
Brother pages: Did you get that sense?
You paged Brother with: Partially. But, I was thinking it was more they were hostile because they didn't want to lose their jobs.
Brother pages: In the cafeteria scene, they all turned on her and did so without any qualms, but in the work room, they wouldn't even look at her, like being seen with Karen was not a good move if you wanted to keep working.
Brother pages: Yes, but not hostile, more... Hostile people tell Karen to get lost. People who are scared like them don't make eye contact.
Brother pages: Another thing I thought of.
Brother pages: First it's mentioned that Thelma's daughter (was it Thelma?) has cancer and is losing her hair due to treatment. Then we find out Thelma wears a wig. Then when Thelma is cooked and is in the shower, we have a shot of the wig in the foreground on the table and Thelma in the background getting scrubbed. Is this all supposed to be some kind of foreshadowing that got dropped? Was Thelma's thinning hair a result of long term low level radiation exposure?
Brother pages: Dolly's girlfriend mentions how she knows that people worked at Kerr McGee because they look like they died before they died. Karen immediately draws a line between this and plutonium, but again, it's dropped, even though it seems like if you could take this anecdote and turn it into empirical evidence, it would be damning on its own, showing that employees are having issues? Was there a history of employees dying before their time or getting sick with cancers that savaged their bodies? Again, just dropped and never picked back up.
Image courtesy of Douglas O. Linder.
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