Silkwood represents a midpoint in Mike Nichols's strength as a director. It's not badly paced, yet the end comes abruptly. It's not that the ending itself is not strong, because it is. However, as is the case with a good handful of Nichols's films after Silkwood, the ending comes before once is ready for it. As a whole though, the film is not badly made. It has a realistic emotional impact.<br /><br />Beautiful Meryl Streep's riveting performance, full of character, is the upholstery for the rest of the cast and the rest of the production. Cher comes in as a close second. Where Streep is a wild Southern girl, Cher is lifelike as the sensitive, easily judged character around whom Streep's Karen Silkwood is tame.<br /><br />The story of Karen Silkwood, who found herself investigating alleged wrongdoing at the plutonium plant where she worked, is dramatized very sensitively, and also very objectively. Though Karen and her husband, played by Kurt Russell, have a large Confederate flag over their bedpost and she doesn't seem to feel any guilt or remorse when she hits a deer with her car, we don't find it difficult investing in her very human story.<br /><br />Silkwood was not as memorable to me as other Streep films or others by Nichols, but looking back on it, I see that it has a tight atmosphere within it, once again in an objective sense because it does not depict a desirable setting but it is nonetheless a real and absorbing one.