Barbra Streisand is a powerhouse in every sense of the word. Her long career has encompassed many facets of show business, from night club singer to Broadway sensation, from Oscar-winning actress to successful producer, and so on. Considering we've been discussing 1991 for the past couple of weeks, it seems appropriate to consider Streisand's legacy, not as a music or movie star, but as a director. That was the year that she released one of her dream projects, The Prince of Tides, which was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Streisand, however, was left out of the directing lineup despite an aggressive campaign and much publicity. The snub stung and robbed Streisand of the honor of becoming the second woman to be nominated for that award, after Lina Wertmüller in the 1970s.
Still, while it's difficult not to see AMPAS' decision as a blatant rebuke of Streisand as a director, one has to wonder if she'd have deserved the nod. After all, 1991 had a stellar, and historic, Best Director lineup...
While Streisand's directing debut only happened in 1983, her filmmaking ambitions were long in the making. During the troubled production of her A Star Is Born, the diva had considered directing the project herself, or in conjunction with production designer Polly Platt. In the end, though Streisand's influence over the 1976 rock musical was intense, the director's chair was occupied by Frank Pierson. The same wouldn't happen when she began developing Yentl, an adaptation of a play by Leah Napolin and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Though, to phrase it as if Streisand had only started working on Yentl after A Star Is Born is erroneous. Like all movies directed by the Oscar-winner, that flick was a dream project that took many years to fulfill.
According to Streisand, she had been planning the movie since her screen debut in 1968's Funny Girl. Attempts to bring the play to the screen had started the year after her Oscar-winning star turn with the buying of the adaptation rights, but constant upheavals pushed it back. Before Streisand took on the job, other directors had been considered like the Czech Ivan Passer. However, after thinking herself too old to play the protagonist, she decided to take the lead behind the camera. As we all know, she ended up playing the titular Yentl, anyway, but that development came later in the pre-production of the movie which had, by that point, transformed into a period musical where all the songs were to be sung by Streisand and no one else.
Babs is indeed too old for the role of a young Ashkenazi Jewish girl who, after her father's death, pretends to be a boy in order to attend religious school. Nonetheless, her singing talent more than makes up for it and, when confronted with a performance as tremendous as her "A Piece of Sky", it's hard to grumble about the casting issue. It took fifteen years to bring Yentl to the screen, over a dozen complete script re-writes, and endless creative tribulations, but Streisand got her way and the result is quite extraordinary. The movie has issues, not the least of which is the criminal waste of Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving in non-singing roles, but Streisand's ambition is felt in every frame.
Whether in the attention to historical detail or the gentility with which emotional drama is drawn out of the characters, Yentl triumphs, and Streisand's direction is a big part of that. For her efforts, she won the Golden Globe for directing, becoming the first and, until now, the only woman to ever do so. AMPAS didn't see fit to gift her similar accolades. She wasn't even nominated for the Oscar, a fate that would be repeated two more times, though only the '91 incident would be a true snub. 1996's The Mirror Has Two Faces has its charms, like its ridiculously old-fashioned values and bizarre romantic hijinks, but The Prince of Tides is where Streisand's directing talent shines best.
Dragging male-centered melodrama kicking and screaming into the mainstream, Streisand's adaptation of Pat Conroy's bestseller is bold, almost brash, with its emotional registers, contrasting moods, and dripping sentiment. Again, the diva had been working on the film for many years before shooting started, giving her time to let ideas percolate and grow. The result is a movie that's directed within an inch of its life, full of showy cinematography and an aggressive score that never relents its function as emotional barometer. Even the interior decoration has a tendency towards the overwrought. For instance, there's a Manhattan upper-class dining room that looks like a music video's set, glowing candelabras as far as the eye can see.
Despite the excess, The Prince of Tides is no worthless piece of lurid soap opera. Streisand's artistic decisions don't always work and often lead to wild tonal incoherence, but there's a lot to admire about her taste for the overdramatic. Without her directorial touch, it's hard to imagine Nick Nolte's performance working as well as it does. He plays a former English teacher from the South who, after his twin sister's suicide attempt, travels to New York and falls in love with his sibling's therapist. As romance blooms, so does the acknowledgment of past trauma, and Nolte's charming hero reveals layers of deepening hurt inside. His vulnerability is spectacular, in part because of how Streisand frames it, with obvious care and sensational style.
I won't lie and say that Streisand is a phenomenal director beyond reproach whose work deserves critical reappraisal. However, I understand why her snub in 1991 was so controversial and painful to bear. The Academy had to go out of its way to not nominate the director of one of the year's biggest contenders. Not to mention that many directors have been nominated for doing far less than what Babs does here. While her snub made the nods for Thelma and Louise and Boyz N the Hood possible, it also served as a reminder that Hollywood had and still has a long way to go when it comes to the recognition of women filmmakers. In a time when the Academy was going gaga for actors turned directors (Costner, Eastwood, Redford, Gibson, Robbins…), Streisand still wasn't enough.
Yentl's streaming on the Roku Channel, Hoopla, and Pluto TV. You can rent The Prince of Tides and The Mirror Has Two Faces from Amazon, Redbox, Google Play, Youtube, and others.