The Prince of Tides

National Review, Feb 17, 1992 by John Simon

AMONG THE HORDE of holiday movies this column is still struggling to catch up with, one is ahead by a nose: Barbra Streisand's The Prince of Tides, based on a quasi-autobiographical novel by Pat Conroy. "Ahead" in this case means bigness, the addressing of purportedly serious questions, the slow gestation and fancy production values, the fact that Miss Streisand both directed and stars as Dr. Susan Lowenstein, a psychiatrist, and that she has taken it all so gravely as to refuse to sing a behind-the-titles theme song.

Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) is an unemployed high-school football coach and English teacher (in that order), whose marriage to Sallie is quietly unraveling in the beautiful South Carolina house they inhabit with three daughters. Meanwhile in New York City, Tom's suicidal sister, Savannah (Melinda Dillon), has this time narrowly missed offing herself, and is under the care of the eminent Dr. Lowenstein. Dr. L. asks Tom to come up to New York and supply helpful background information, particularly about the siblings' mother, Lila (Kate Nelligan), a woman whose vanity was a handicap, but whose toughness was a help, especially against a brutish husband and father, Henry (Brad Sullivan), a stock character pretty much in tune with the rest of this inflated dimestore novel now spreading its wings and Wingos across the wide screen yonder.

The movie, with artfully burnished cinematography by Stephen Goldblatt, has the look classics are made of; it is mostly well cast; and it is directed with the proficiency formerly deployed by cannily accommodating directors under the paternal gaze of old Hollywood studio bosses - except for on not inconsiderable difference: Miss Streisand's pretensions to art. This can also be said of Conroy's novel, with its trite ideas hungering for significance, its melodramatically contrived and strategically parceled-out climaxes, and its plummily plummeting prose.

Some of the Turgidity could luckily not be fitted into a screenplay (by Conroy and Becky Johnston), but enough survives in the hero-narrator's interior monologues that manage to push down into shallownesses better left unexplored. Many stories contend for equal atteention: Lila's unhappy married life and icily arriviste second marriage; the three Wingo children's sometimes idyllic and more often troubled tideland adolescence (including that of the most dazzling but subsequently tragic elder brother); the rocky home life of Tom and Sallie (Blythe Danner), and their three kids; Dr. L.'s treatment of Savannah, who soon mysteriously gets lost in the shuffle; and Dr. L.'s curiously unremunerated sessions with Tom, which evolve into regular therapy and the film's main thread.

From this thread hang, like so many gaudy beads, 1) Dr. L.'s curative uncovering of the dark family secret; 2) Tom's curing of Dr. L.'s acutely hostile boy (Jason Gould, Miss Streisand's son by Elliot) whom the ex-coach turns, literally and figuratively, into a ballplaying college-freshman-to-be (balls succeeding where psychiatry evidently failed); 3) the wonderful, life-enchancing affair that develops between Tom and Dr. L., whose husband, the famous concert violinist and adulterer, is yet another perfect, albeit polished, beast (Dr. L.'s expertise is no help with her husband either); and 4) Tom's (and Dr. L.'s) great renunciation: a return to Sallie (who gives up the other man), the girls (the eldest of whom was headed for an Electra complex), and even a new understanding for Lila and her chilly, plutocratic marriage. That pretty much covers the main themes, and though the film has lost all interest in Savannah, one assumes that Dr. L. cannot but save her, too.

If The Prince of Tides is at all watchable, the reasons are chiefly the watery landscapes and several solid performances. Nick Nolte, once an inauspicious Hollywood tyro, has evolved from a hunk and hulk into a sincere and confident actor, capable of both forcefulness and sensitivity, joviality and torment, and of squeezing life out of claptrap. Kate Nelligan makes Lila not only believable, which must have been hard, but also likable, which must have seemed impossible. Blythe Danner is restrained, moving, and quite marvelous as Sallie, a role as short in duration as on originality. Jason Gould is adroity type-cast, but even the distinguished Dutch actor Jereon Krabbe cannot save the fancy fiddler husband from being Conroy's cliche redneck view of the long-hair artist and European swine

As for Dr. L., a number of psyciatrists questioned by the New York Times expressed their intense displeasure with the concept and characterization, including Miss Streisand's fingernails. To which I would add her Brooklyn accent, of the kind hard to retain after years of college and medical school. Still, she tries hard to convey a therapist, an actress, and a compassionate human being with roughly equal, or equally rough, success. Tom Brown's famous ditty, "I do not love thee, Doctor Fell," works as handily with Dr. L., although "the reason why" is rather easier to tell.