The Way We Were (1973, Sydney Pollack)
Barbara Streisand was always a long way from being beautiful but she can, given careful lighting, be striking and memorable; not just for that amazing nose but for her eyes which frequently express more than the dialogue allows. In The Way We Were, she’s quite radiant, and superbly expressive - there is a lovely moment when Robert Redford nuzzles her neck and she allows us to understand both her intense erotic desire for him and a basic uncertainty and an unwillingness to succumb to physical pleasure. She has a difficult role here; spiky and unsympathetic with a lot of talking masking a basic emotional inarticulacy. But she manages to pull it off. It might be her best screen acting work although one longs to see her sing as well as hear her on the soundtrack. Like all great singers, Streisand opens up when she sings and to put her in a non-singing role is a waste - I feel the same about seeing Frank Sinatra and Willie Nelson in dramatic roles, no matter how good they can be.
The Way We Were is a combination of grand romance between two megastars and a historical greatest hits package from the 1940s, tracing Streisand and Redford from their college days in the late 1930s to the McCarthy blacklists. It’s decked out with fantastic costumes and some totally convincing period detail, the contribution of the great Stephen Grimes. The overwhelmingly nostalgic atmosphere is blatantly designed to appeal to the 35-up age bracket who would still go and see a big movie provided it wasn’t dirty. The Way We Were isn’t remotely dirty, despite a couple of very discreet sex scenes, and it would probably benefit from a some life-enhancing vulgarity here and there. Still,in the class of big ‘clean movies’ of the period, it’s a lot better than either Love Story or The Great Gatsby, let alone the dreaded Mary Queen of Scots. Sydney Pollack is a sharp and efficient director who loves actors and gets work out of Bradford Dillman and Patrick O’Neal which neither actor has bettered. Pollack keeps the pace going and the film trundles along from set-piece to set-piece. If these seem weirdly disconnected, it’s because I don’t think the central relationship ever quite works. What is it that attracts these two people who have virtually nothing in common, not even a sense of humour? Arthur Laurents writes some good, bitchy dialogue but it might suit a gay couple better than these two, especially when Robert Redford seems oddly disengaged. He doesn’t have the intensity of a writer and, as so often in his roles during this period, he allows his hair and teeth to create the character for him. Indeed, Hubbell Gardner barely exists at all, especially compared to his mate, and the blankness of Redford suggests that he’s already getting prepared to play Jay Gatsby in the same irritating manner.
As a political study of an era, the film assumes considerable knowledge on the part of the viewer. If you’re uncertain about the Spanish Civil War or the HUAAC, then the film does not enlighten you with the basics. The pre-release editing which cut some of the blacklisting scenes doesn’t help in this respect. But it’s never made sufficiently clear that it was, at one point, considered patriotic to be pro-Soviet and that this was what got a large number of people into trouble after the war when America became fiercely anti-Communist. Then, the film posits a false black and white choice between Redford’s pragmatism and Streisand’s commitment without ever satisfactorily finding a middle road. Potentially important supporting characters played by Viveca Lindfors and Murray Hamilton drift in and out of the narrative without sufficient definition and, as a result, the political viewpoint of the film suffers. At heart, it’s an eminently liberal film and that’s heartwarming but the era needs a more complex approach than is provided here. I’d love to see a genuinely complicated film made about McCarthyism from a right-wing perspective if only because most films about the period - good ones like The Front and Good Night and Good Luck - simply preach to the converted. I’m a left-wing liberal but I think I am mature enough to have my prejudices challenged.
And yet, the nostalgic tug of the film is potent even for someone born well after the events it depicts. The music by Marvin Hamlisch is corny as hell but goddamit, it works and there are beautifully poignant moments. I particularly love the moment on the yacht between Redford and Bradford Dillmann - the pair make a more convincing romantic couple than Redford and Streisand incidentally, although that’s presumably unintentional. At the end, Streisand is heartbreaking because she underplays - far more moving, as a consequence, than she is at the end of A Star Is Born when she is allowed to go over the top or in any of the film she directed when she seems so fascinated by herself that nothing else gets a look in. I think she’s got one great role left in her but only if she looks back and remembers the virtue of keeping it down when she acts and blossoming forth when she sings.