Streisand and her collaborators, including author Pat Conroy, did a good job of turning his unwieldy book into an interesting movie. In this version, Melinda Dillon has a small role as a brilliant poet who transforms the sadness and terror of her childhood with her art. The price she pays is a total lack of memory and a compulsion for suicide. Her brother, Nolte, remembers their harrowing childhood as the children of a beautiful mother and a brutal shrimper in South Carolina all too well but he has hidden the pain behind suave good old boy mannerisms and an emotional withdrawal that is endangering his marriage. After his sister’s latest suicide attempt, Nolte comes to New York to help her psychiatrist, Streisand, piece together their childhood from his memories. It’s a comforting erector set view of psychology that is echoed in Nolte’s relationship with the psychiatrist’s rebellious son played by Streisand’s real offspring, Jason Gould. Problems can be “fixed” — all it takes is a little know-how and hard work. What’s interesting is Nolte’s journey inward as Streisand forces him to remember and how those changes are expressed outwardly. Meanwhile, outside Nolte’s head, events are running away from his control as he begins to fall in love with his interlocutor. Streisand, the director, seems to lose control a bit here too, and the movie loses steam for a time while Nolte and Streisand bill and coo. As a love story, Prince of Tides is uninteresting. Fortunately, it’s not really a love story at all, though it is about love in all its beautiful and destructive forms. Nolte’s name is being bandied about as Academy Award material. Certainly, with his success in Cape Fear, this is his year, but the acting in Prince of Tides is uniformly good. Carlin is great as a sympathetic character that happens to be gay, and Gould demonstrates that he’s inherited more than his looks from his parents Streisand and Elliott Gould. La Streisand herself is generous to her co-stars though she occasionally loses herself in narcissistic trances while the camera focuses on her ability to look great in professional suits, and walk in too-high heels. Streisand’s been in front of cameras so long she’s thinks of them as mirrors. Luckily she has a good eye and it, more often than not, has the ability to look straight to the soul.
This article appears in December 27 • 1991 (Cover).