Meryl Streep is one of the world’s greatest actresses. She’s been nominated for a record 21 Academy Awards and won three. She is beloved by critics and fans alike. But the thing is, up until recently I’d not actually seen all that many of her movies. Oh sure I’d seen The Deer Hunter and Manhattan, Death Becomes Her and The Manchurian Candidate remake, but most of her big classic films had passed me by.

One of the things I’m realizing as I’m working my way through these early 1980s films is that a lot of these films seem to exist in my cultural memory but at the same time I haven’t actually watched many of them. This actually makes sense as I think about it. I was seven or eight years old when Silkwood came out. Of course, I wasn’t interested in a grand drama about a nuclear whistle-blower. But it was also one of the biggest movies of the year, making lots of money and being nominated for numerous awards. I’m sure I wasn’t following the Oscars at that young age but I mostly likely would have heard buzz about the film while my parents were watching television or seen Meryl Streep and Cher appearing in various magazines. No doubt the film was talked about often in the following years to come.

All I knew about the film up until watching it the other day was that Streep played some sort of whistle-blower and that she was killed for it. I assumed she worked at a nuclear power plant and that the film was going to be some sort of tense, nail-biting action film.

I was wrong on both accounts. Based on a true story Silkwood is the story of Karen Silkwood (Streep) who worked at a plant in Oklahoma that made Uranium fuel. She did become a whistle-blower and probably was killed for it, but the film is not at all a thriller. It is much more a character piece than anything else.

One of the things I found really fascinating about the film is that Karen is not a brilliant scientist or an expert on nuclear energy. She’s a fairly uneducated blue-collar worker. She’s basically working on an assembly line. Albeit a radioactive assembly line. One that can kill her. She’s not even that good at her job. The film shows her slacking off on numerous occasions. She often leaves the line to go chase down a friend to chat about something, or do some other task she could easily do on her break. She constantly stops working to converse with her fellow line workers. At one point she brings in a birthday cake, something likely not allowed on the uranium line. To leave her workstation she must waive her hands over a radioactive tester machine and she constantly has to be reminded to do this.

Her ex-husband and three small children live in Texas, but she rarely seems interested in them. Early in the film, she takes a couple of days off to go see them. She actually forgets to ask for the time off and has to beg her coworkers the day before to switch shifts with her. Once she arrives she learns that her ex has planned to take the kids to see his father. So she only gets a few hours with them so she takes them to a diner and spends more time talking to the friends she’s taken with her than her own kids. Later, we’ll see her call, but late at night when they are in bed.

She really just falls into activism. One day one of her friends comes up hot – the radiation monitor goes off and she must be thoroughly scrubbed down. Karen goes with her and comforts her. When she learns that they didn’t do a throat swab – testing for radiation inside her body she becomes furious. This leads to her raising concerns with her union rep. He takes her to see the national union people and from there, she becomes very engaged in union activities, much to the annoyance of her boyfriend and roommate.

She lives in a small house with her boyfriend Drew (Kurt Russell) and Dolly (Cher). Much of the film is spent with them just hanging out at the house. These are fun lovin’ people. Drew likes to drink beer and make love to Karen. Dolly is in love with Karen and wishes she could be hers. Later she gets a girlfriend and that causes more household tension.

The film doesn’t make much, if anything at all, about what the company thinks of her activism. It annoys her coworkers but only because they worry they will lose their jobs. It angers Drew and Dolly because it is interfering with the time they get to spend with her. If the company is planning on killing her we sure don’t see it. There aren’t any tense scenes showing mysterious men stalking her or leaving bullets in her mailbox. Even her death is left up in the air. We see her driving down the road, headed to a meeting. There is a car with its headlights shining brightly behind her. And then nothing. That’s more factual, I suppose because her death was ruled an accident and there are no documents indicating the company killed or even harassed her. There were some documents missing from her crashed car – documents she was taking to a meeting with the press that she was seen with not long before the accident. But that’s not proof of anything.

That’s not a ding on the film either. It isn’t really interested in the mystery of her death. Like I said it is a character piece. And a good one at that. Streep is just wonderful. She’s a very physical actor and a subtle one at that. She creates little ticks for her characters, she lets us understand her mood by a small facial expression or simple gesture. Cher is likewise fantastic. She’s much more natural in her performance, existing in it.

I definitely went down a rabbit hole after watching this film, looking up the real history of Karen Silkwood and the company she worked for. It is pretty fascinating.