Dispatches from Streisandland (1983–1996)
By: Joe Shetina
Tags: Media, Pop Culture, Barbra Streisand, Film

Dispatches from Streisandland (1983–1996)

Part Two of a Barbra Streisand Retrospective

Featuring: Yentl (1983) | The Prince of Tides (1991) | The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996)

If you missed it, here’s Part One!

Barbra Joan Streisand made her Broadway debut nearly sixty years ago. By the time she was 30, she was an Oscar winner and a bonafide movie star. At age 40, she was a four-time Grammy winner (and would go on to win four more). At 50, she had directed two Oscar-nominated films. Barbra is a living legend. She occupies an echelon of pop culture greatness that belongs exclusively to her.

I’ve always liked Barbra. Some of her eccentricities and indulgences grated on me, but I respected the legend. After a while, I just came to know what to avoid and what to laugh at.

Then I started watching and rewatching these seven movies.

What I was most drawn to was how Barbra — as a filmmaker, but also as curator of her own projects — seems to make only what is personal to her. In the seven films I watched, I never once got the impression she was phoning it in. Even projects where she isn’t (credited as) director seem to have her fingerprints all over them. We can call it vanity or narcissism, we can call it self-indulgence, and God knows many do. But the oft-overlooked component of Barbra’s success is her attention to emotions rather than, say, good taste or a polished product.

When I started this I had no intention of becoming a Born Again Barbra Fan. But that’s what happened, and so, these “dispatches” are less critical than they might have been. I find myself defending components of Barbra’s work I used to actively dislike — or agreed when someone else actively disliked them. As a result, I’m almost overwhelmingly generous, maybe even bleary-eyed. But in the spirit of Streisand, please … indulge me.

Yentl (1983)

Directed by Barbra Streisand; Written by Barbra Streisand, Jack Rosenthal; Based on the short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” by Isaac Bashevis Singer and the play, Yentl, by Leah Napolin and Singer. Original songs and score by Michel Legrand, Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman. Starring Barbra Streisand, Mandy Patinkin, Amy Irving, Nehemiah Persoff, Steven Hill, Allan Corduner, Miriam Margolyes, Doreen Mantle.

Yentl (1983) — Barbra’s directorial debut: Yentl is an unmarried Ashkenazi girl living in early 20th Century Poland whose father has secretly tutored her in religious texts — as women are forbidden from study. After he dies, she seeks to continue her education at an esteemed yeshiva. She disguises herself as a man by the name of Anshel, meets and falls in love with a fellow scholar, Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin), and through a convoluted and comic course of events, ends up marrying Avigdor’s fiancee, Hadass (Amy Irving).

There’s still a lingering skepticism, even downright hostility toward Streisand’s directing career. But even anecdotes about her early career suggest this was a logical progression. My brother pointed me toward an interview with prolific sound designer Jack Solomon, who worked with Streisand on four films. He recounted how, even as early as Funny Girl (her film debut), she asked questions and got involved in the process in a way that fundamentally changed their approach to the soundscape of the film. She was eager to understand the nuances of all the decisions being made around her. He paints a picture of a young but curious artist who asked questions, posed solutions, and listened to people who knew more about a subject than her because she wanted to learn. Solomon called her “the biggest pro [he] ever worked with.”

It’s fitting, then, that Yentl should be a story about teaching, learning, and above all, questioning.

I’m not a Christian by any stretch. I was baptized Methodist against my will, as I was an infant at the time. But because so much of my family is Christian, I know more about it than, say, Judaism. My impression of Christianity was always one of silence and submission. Judaism, as I can only glean from my friends, mentors, and popular media, seems to look down on the apathy of submission. It seems that to be faithful, one must always be curious. I know nothing about Talmudic study, but the debates Yentl, Avigdor, the rabbis all engage in are really just a series of questions — questions meant to probe who we are and what we are meant to be. The ultimate irony, though it’s unsurprising, is that women are expected to be submissive, and those who would partake in this kind of learning are called “demons.” Although “demon” invokes something spiritual and religious, the real crime Yentl commits is that she refuses to accept the charade of social, man-made proscriptions of women as something religious, divine, and therefore “natural.” But she isn’t interested in turning her back on her faith either. Her donning the Anshel drag is as much about being able to study and have access to a man’s world as it is to avoid being ostracized from a community and a faith she passionately believes in. There is beauty in the faith that goes beyond man-made proscriptions in its name. As her father tells her before one of their secret lessons: “I’m sure God will understand, I’m not so sure about the neighbors.”

Almost every song in the score is a question: Papa, can you hear me? Where is it written what is I’m meant to be? Will someone ever look at me that way? With all there is, why settle for just a piece of sky?

These songs are also almost always presented in voice-over. I’m usually down on voice-over songs. The performance of the interior is what makes musicals exciting and special, so when films hide musical numbers in voice-over, it usually feels cheap and unimaginative. In Funny Girl, it’s used for comedic effect and it does work. Here, however, it’s a vital mode of storytelling. It’s dangerous to be asking the questions she asks through these numbers, and so it makes sense that they are part of her running interior monologue. Only when she is alone do we see Streisand mouth Yentl’s words.

I think the cast does stellar work: Amy Irving is unfairly maligned as Hadass, a character who is not expected to have a personality outside of her housework. Irving has the right naive look to pull it off, but the writing robs her of an arc. Nehemiah Persoff’s gentle performance as Yentl’s father is also worthy of praise. Their connection is deeply felt. Streisand is full of feeling and projects some truly startling emotional insights into a character that has to embody and contain so much in the way of secrets, passion, and curiosity.

The biggest surprise in rewatching Yentl — I hadn’t seen it in at least a decade — was how moved I was by Mandy Patinkin. As Avigdor, he brings his usual intensity to a role that requires him to swing back and forth between boyish enthusiasm and adolescent petulance, hidden behind the demeanor of a learned man. Avigdor stimulates Yentl’s mind and body in ways she’s never known. They share everything (everything they can share, anyway). They become brothers.

One scene where Avigdor wrestles Anshel/Yentl to the ground and sits on top of her, Yentl screams “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” And the way she looks at him — as if she wants to tell him everything; as if everything he needed to know was right there in that gaze — it’s the most dangerous moment in a film full of them. Not dangerous in the sense of anti-queer violence (although that does hang over Yentl in ways that aren’t necessarily probed), but in an emotional and spiritual sense. There is a truth to that moment that’s too forbidden. We are meant to think Avigdor’s only response to it is bewilderment. The fool still has no idea his best friend is in love with him!

When Yentl undresses in front of him in their climactic scene together, there is the expected outrage, the invocation of the “demon” woman, but then — in the movie’s most brilliant stroke of genius — Avigdor tells her in the most tender way he somehow knew what that look meant and knew he felt it, too. When I tell you I bawled! It’s a pitch-perfect moment for him.

Yentl is undervalued and underrated, brimming with beauty, humor, and questions about faith and being that are universal.

The Prince of Tides (1991)

Directed by Barbra Streisand. Written by Pat Conroy, Becky Johnston. Based on Conroy’s novel. Starring Nick Nolte, Barbra Streisand, Blythe Danner, Kate Nelligan, Jeroen Krabbe, Melinda Dillon, George Carlin, Jason Gould, Bradley Sullivan.

The Prince of Tides (1991) — An out-of-work football coach and English professor (Nick Nolte) is summoned to New York City to assist a therapist (Barbra Streisand) in piecing together his childhood trauma in the wake of his sister’s (Melinda Dillon) latest suicide attempt.

The Prince of Tides begins with Tom Wingo (Nolte) musing, cynically, about his childhood as we’re treated to sun-kissed footage of him and his two siblings as children racing around their coastal childhood home at golden hour. Over this scene, so idyllic it almost seems sarcastic, he tells us, wryly: “I don’t know when my parents began their war against each other — but I do know the only prisoners they took were their children.”

If it wasn’t immediately clear, you should know that The Prince of Tides is not a film interested in subtlety. It’s the kind of movie where Blythe Danner, as Nolte’s frustrated wife, is tasked with making lines like “That’s the first time you’ve touched me in weeks” seem believable — with mixed results.

Tom comes to New York with a chip on his shoulder and he has no problem bringing it into his meetings with Dr. Lowenstein. Much of this anger feels like a miscalculation, though. Again, the movie seems to want its characters at a 10 all the time. It’s obnoxious behavior. Benign maybe to him, but belligerent to her, to us. Like a group of male friends in a bar screaming, bellowing through an otherwise friendly conversation. They might not see anything wrong with it, but it might make the hairs on my arms stand at attention.

This overwrought tone is par for the course in the early scenes. Our characters are almost cruelly cornered into melodramatic conversations we’ve heard in more convincing movies. Nolte’s unemployed and dissatisfied academic, Danner’s put-upon housewife, and Kate Nelligan’s cryptic and cruel Southern momma are all characters we’ve seen before, and nothing that comes out of their mouths is at all surprising or profound. They wear their resentments on their sleeves and every conversation seems to end… and even begin… in a shouting match. There’s almost a rote quality to it that seems to say, “This movie is exactly what you thought it was gonna be, right?”

This is all to say I love this film.

About 30 minutes in, a strange and beguiling comfort began to creep over my viewing experience. This is where the story begins to go beyond the would-be profound coming-of-age musings about childhood and wannabe Douglas Sirk dialogue of the first scenes and into territory that feels less familiar. Tom comes to like New York, to feel less resentful of the therapist, and to allow himself some small moments of satisfaction. He still bats away Lowenstein’s constant prying and what he insists are Freudian traps, but as we expect, he begins to fall victim himself. What did go wrong? And when? And why?

Just as the movie does in those early scenes, Tom seems to collapse people in his mind into simple categories. It makes it all easier to deal with. As we learn more about them, and as Tom is forced to break those categories open and the din of constant agitation lifts from his crowded head, the movie becomes more introspective as well. The characters become more complex, less confined to narrative expectations.

Raised by a narcissistic mother and a violent father, Tom has been taught his whole life to conceal emotion, keep secrets, trust no one. In one flashback, his mother (Kate Nelligan) whispers to him that he’s her favorite child and warns not to tell his brother and sister she said so. It’s as if she’s intoning a curse — something that should make him beam with pride is instead the seedling of guilt that will grow well into his adulthood. Years later, he tells Lowenstein, both of his siblings informed him their mother had told them the same thing. Though his father’s abuse was more physical, his mother’s lies cut deeper. Where he could physically match, even best his father in a fight if necessary, the insidious, elusive nature of his mother’s manipulation confuses him and renders him helpless even as a grown man.

When the story begins to wrap up its second act, which most screenwriting books identify as the point where the drama should be at its fever pitch, the film actually seems to slow down in some ways. To anesthetize you, perhaps, for what’s coming. It is at this point that Tom resolves to finally tell Dr. Lowenstein about the most horrific night in his family’s already-troubled history. Nolte and Streisand (as performer AND director) are at their very best during this revelation. It’s a bludgeon of a scene. But it’s also quiet — for the most part. Flashbacks to the night in question are almost like jump scares, bits of terror reaching out of the past to lash at Tom’s psyche. But he remains so agonizingly, heartbreakingly still throughout, as if, even as he tells Lowenstein, he is still unable to let himself feel as if it happened to him. Only when he does release, weeping in Lowenstein’s arms, does his body seem to catch up with his memory.

As a writer, tidy, revelatory scenes like this irk me. People are varied and complex and one moment can’t possibly explain how they became the people they are now and blah blah bullshit blah.

As a viewer, the scene left me breathless and broken.

Even the much-maligned romance between Tom and Lowenstein doesn’t bother me. Their scenes near the end, though oddly shoehorned in, are so warm and beautifully-rendered. Is it an ethical relationship? Probably not, but by the end, I don’t care. What Streisand does with the material is what makes it sing. It reminds me of a similar feat Clint Eastwood would achieve (trust me, I don’t like praising him) with the saccharine but deeply-felt longing of The Bridges of Madison County four years later.

At some point, I became less concerned about the movie being TOO MUCH and more impressed at how much care Streisand is able to imbue in these people and their heartbreaks. That’s why the blunt, sometimes hokey dialogue and simplistic story beats don’t matter as much to me. At worst, it’s obvious, but nonetheless entertaining.

Streisand’s gift to the material is her heart. As a director, she is a master of externalizing big, complicated, palpable emotions through different modes of cinematic storytelling. Just as the voice-over in Yentl mirrors that character’s journey of yearning and questioning, The Prince of Tides’ shrill tone relaxes only when Tom’s headspace becomes less crowded with hostility and vitriol. The people in his life, mostly women, can’t be contained in the tidy, but confining boxes he imagines for them. Yes, maybe that starts to make it yet another movie about a man coming to see the humanity in the women who care for him, but Streisand is a director who is deeply interested in men — in a way that most male directors are not. She refuses to allow Tom to remain some malcontented, aggressively sexist antihero. This is a man tortured by masculine notions of restraint and emotional concealment. The movie presents him with a way out.

The Prince of Tides is a journey into softness, into vulnerability, into feeling. Without shame or embarrassment. It’s a movie about the perils of restraint. For this reason, its indulgence is more than appropriate — it’s the whole point.

The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996)

Directed by Barbra Streisand; Written by Richard LaGravenese; Based on Le Miroir à deux faces by André Cayatte, Gérard Oury; Starring Barbra Streisand, Jeff Bridges, Pierce Brosnan, George Segal, Mimi Rogers, Lauren Bacall, Brenda Vaccaro, Austin Pendleton.

The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) — A romantic comedy about a frumpy English professor (Streisand), a stuffy math professor (Jeff Bridges), and their attempt to carve out a meaningful relationship without physical intimacy of any kind.

There are things that surprise and delight me about The Mirror Has Two Faces. I think the story itself presents a lot of possibilities for classic romcom tomfoolery — and delivers on too few for as long as it is. Although the script is weak, it allows us time to linger on both characters and their eccentricities. It feels vaguely like a James L. Brooks movie in that way. Without the abundant cliches, it might have been as good as a Brooks movie, too.

Mirror hearkens back to Funny Girl. It brings our star back to the insecurities and desperation to be seen that she built her early career on. It’s almost a funhouse mirror, or a portal into some parallel world, where she didn’t become a beloved icon of the screen.

Her Rose Morgan believes she is a Plain Jane who hasn’t soured on love and romance so much as she has given up finding a man worth sharing them with. She’d rather crack wise, annoy her overbearing mother (Lauren Bacall), and cancel dates to instead watch classic comedies or baseball games on television. But Rose is a sort-of closeted romantic, even quoting an article in one scene that described falling in love for the first time: “We hear Puccini in our heads.”

But for Jeff Bridges’ Gregory, the mythic, culturally prescriptive concept of love and marriage and sex has only made him suffer. This is a man who becomes so horny for his emotionally closed-off ex-girlfriend that he damn near has a panic attack at the sight of her in the audience of a lecture. Sex and physical connection have led both of them down paths of heartbreak and bad decisions, so it’s no wonder the two would want to see what a relationship would be like without them. Even so, Rose secretly holds out hope Gregory will come to love her body as much as he does her mind.

Of course, things don’t go to plan. In their own ways, each one discovers that a passionless “meeting of the minds” instead of a marriage isn’t gonna cut it. Rose undergoes a physical transformation montage that is as quintessentially 90s as stonewashed jeans.

Streisand is really good, though this role is a bit of soft pitch. Jeff Bridges is charming, although some of his haplessness started to stretch my incredulity (and my nerves) around an hour in. I do enjoy the film’s observation that in his search for a romantic relationship based on something more meaningful than physical attraction, he reveals just how superficial and shallow his own expectations are.

Lauren Bacall received her first and only Oscar nomination for her role as Rose’s mother. Hannah Morgan makes Blanche Devereaux look like a paragon of humility. While she spends most of the film as a delightful, but woefully underwritten grande dame who only exists to look fabulous and harp on Rose’s awkwardness, Bacall’s last few scenes with Barbra are as close to great as the movie ever gets. In their heart to heart about the merits and unfairness of physical beauty, Bacall’s work is honest and heartfelt. She doesn’t settle for cheap sentimentality like the script does. This is meant to be her “Oscar clip,” her one magic moment of introspection after several one-note scenes, and she sells it. As one of the last working actors of the Golden Age, it’s startling and poignant to see Bacall here, with her grace, Transatlantic accent, and profound gaze (“We had faces then!”) — all of these have faded a little, vocal tone and wrinkles have gotten a little deeper, but they still light up the screen.

Of Streisand’s directorial efforts, The Mirror Has Two Faces is far and away the most self-indulgent. Part Shop Around the Corner, part self-help manifesto, it’s Barbra’s love letter to movies, romance, and herself. The most frequent criticisms I’ve come across label her a shameless, even pathological narcissist, and the film as her ultimate vanity project.

Two particularly nasty reviews, one by Edward Guthmann for the San Francisco Chronicle and the other by Rita Kempley for the Washington Post, reveal qualms with Streisand that seem to be just as personal as they are artistic.

Guthmann writes: “Look back and you’ll see that Streisand’s career, from the beginning, was one long battle cry for geeks and wallflowers and Jewish girls with big noses — a series of wish-fulfillment scenarios […] Isn’t therapy cheaper?”

Kempley is even more cutting: “The movie is actually a very public tragedy for Streisand, who still can’t quite believe that she’s not Michelle Pfeiffer. With a little bit off the tip, she might have been. But at 54, it’s time to get over girlish hang-ups, forget the noble schnoz.”

Like William Wyler at the time of Funny Girl, Guthmann and Kempley draw comparisons to Bette Davis. However, this time the terms are far less flattering. They compare her to Davis’ Baby Jane Hudson character, the vain, narcissistic old bitty living in denial about her talent and relevance. It’s akin to the criticism Davis herself received even in the face of her great work in Baby Jane. There’s a sense that she’s too old to matter and too successful to be doing a movie like this. But what was the alternative? No one was casting Davis in anything else, and she couldn’t stop the time.

Suggesting Streisand get therapy and a nose job is base and cruel, but these are only two more in a long line of reviewers who take their criticism of Barbra Streisand’s art (which could be totally valid) to a personal and unnecessarily hateful level. The famously homophobic, misogynistic, anti-semitic, and all-around sack of shit human being John Simon practically made a ritual of trashing Streisand’s looks in his reviews. In his review of What’s Up, Doc?, he writes: “[Streisand] looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun.” There are countless hateful, but perhaps less straightforward, comments in other reviews that don’t bear repeating. These go beyond critiques of women not being sexy enough to be on the screen. According to these critics, she’s not even fit to be seen in public.

Is Mirror completely obnoxious in how much it expects us to root for Streisand’s put-upon protagonist? Yes, it is. I think that’s true of a lot of romcoms, frankly. That Barbra directs herself in this one and has the nerve to make you believe she could be beautiful is exactly the dog whistle her detractors needed to start flinging more mud. Maybe Barbra does love herself a little too much, but what’s the alternative?

She’s always been upfront about how badly these criticisms stung, but she never crumbled beneath them. And it’s personal attacks like this that show just how unnerving it is for someone like Barbra, or anyone else who’s been deemed not pretty or sexy enough for stardom, to make films about accepting oneself. Shit, Barbra was ahead of the curve, and she didn’t have an army of rabid fans on the Internet to ward off gross attacks like this.

But Barbra gets the last laugh. Because, as her character Rose Morgan does, she seems to believe wholeheartedly in movies as makers of myths and magic. In all their ridiculous, fantastical wish-fulfillment, movies make the ugly duckling into the beautiful swan (or, “shwan,” to call back a number from Funny Girl), and have the power to turn love and life into music.