Books, Arts & Manners: Fustian

There are very serious problems with Silkwood. As I keep having to say, you shouldn’t make biographical films about contemporary persons unless you know the facts and are in a position to tell them. This, however, is very rarely the case, and the films fall on their behinds between fact and fiction. Individuals from the distant past are fair game: The filmmaker can tell the known facts and then conjecture away to his heart’s content. What about Karen Silkwood, though, the young woman from Texas who worked in a Kerr-McGee nuclear-fuel plant in Oklahoma, led a fairly loose life, became politicized and a labor-union spy, exposed laxnesses in the plant’s safety procedures, and was allegedly about to make some tremendous revelations to a New York Times reporter whom she was driving to meet when her car went off the road and she died? It was 1974, and Karen was 28. Was it an accident or murder?

Though I haven’t followed the case closely, this much is clear: We don’t know what really happened, and probably never shall, but the available evidence suggests that Karen Silkwood had no sensational documents, and that it is unlikely that she met with foul play. Which is not to say that management wasn’t remiss, that Karen (having become contaminated) would not eventually have died of lung cancer, and that it was mere coincidence that the Kerr-McGee facility in Crescent, Oklahoma, shut down a year later. But there just isn’t enough hard evidence; so the writers, Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, and the director, Mike Nichols, were forced to hint, waffle, and contradict themselves into a haze of innuendos, discrepancies, and, occasionally, total opacity.

JS

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John Simon

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There are very serious problems with Silkwood. As I keep having to say, you shouldn’t make biographical films about contemporary persons unless you know the facts and are in a position to tell them. This, however, is very rarely the case, and the films fall on their behinds between fact and fiction. Individuals from the distant past are fair game: The filmmaker can tell the known facts and then conjecture away to his heart’s content. What about Karen Silkwood, though, the young woman from Texas who worked in a Kerr-McGee nuclear-fuel plant in Oklahoma, led a fairly loose life, became politicized and a labor-union spy, exposed laxnesses in the plant’s safety procedures, and was allegedly about to make some tremendous revelations to a New York Times reporter whom she was driving to meet when her car went off the road and she died? It was 1974, and Karen was 28. Was it an accident or murder?

Though I haven’t followed the case closely, this much is clear: We don’t know what really happened, and probably never shall, but the available evidence suggests that Karen Silkwood had no sensational documents, and that it is unlikely that she met with foul play. Which is not to say that management wasn’t remiss, that Karen (having become contaminated) would not eventually have died of lung cancer, and that it was mere coincidence that the Kerr-McGee facility in Crescent, Oklahoma, shut down a year later. But there just isn’t enough hard evidence; so the writers, Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, and the director, Mike Nichols, were forced to hint, waffle, and contradict themselves into a haze of innuendos, discrepancies, and, occasionally, total opacity.