Streisand Sings!

Barbra Streisand's CV includes Funny Girl, Hello Dolly!, Funny Lady, Yentl, and of course scores of singing engagements. Like Bette Davis she combines a bigger-than-life stage persona with unusual looks (Davis is a better actor; Streisand is more of a performer). She tends to play the ugly-duckling-who-becomes-a-swan part quite often--including in the non-musical and highly entertaining Mirror Has Two Faces--which is almost entirely disconcerting since her personality tends to knock people flat before they notice her looks.

MIKE SAYS this film made me angry, very very angry.  Because somehow I got into my thirties without learning one very important movie fact: Barbara Streisand is AMAZING.

When the film started, I was nearly gave up within the first ten minutes.  But when the first musical number started, I began to laugh, and I kept laughing for most of the film. Streisand is hilarious, and thoroughly enjoyable. Her timing is fantastic; her singing and performance are nearly perfect. I was completely bowled over by her comedic skills, regardless of the movie's title.

The musical numbers of the film are fun and well done, though packed into clusters, and as such, the long periods between the numbers are a bit slow.

My only real issue with the film was the disturbingly calm and charming portrayal of Nick by Omar Sharif. Because of the age of the film ( Late sixties) the film uses some cuts, shots and pans that have long since been abandoned by traditional film. These shot are now used for horror films and abstract film-making to create a sense of foreboding and danger. Unfortunately, the majority of these shots are used for Nick, which prevented me from ever trusting him.

I spent the first half of the film terrified that it would take a twist, and the rest of the film would be about a woman recovering from rape.  While this may seem a bit extreme, I couldn't get past this small translation error in the film's language.  Another small confusion was the time setting of the film; despite some very expensive and colorful sets that were typical of classic musicals, the few flashes of location shooting clashed with the sets so strongly that the pallet of the film shifted from scene to scene. The film has just enough 70's graininess to it, that my brain couldn't ever quite nail down when exactly the film took place.

Despite this, I was impressed by the classiness of Nicks role, and his soft spoken manner and nature. Even though this hit me as creepy, it was still impressive to me that he never became a real threat to his wife and family.  The film preserved this small safe area, that everyone was safe, even though their hearts may be broken in the end.

Despite the quality of the acting and the musical numbers, the film's story and plot are a bit stretched, and the pacing is just plain inconsistent.  The movie is also quite long, and despite being fairly entertained, I felt every bit of that length, as did the various members of my family, who all slowly wandered out of the living room as they lost interest.

Funny Girl was a surprise, and I was completely shocked by how much I enjoyed it.  Not only that, but it finally clarified a very odd scene/reference from Mrs. Doubtfire that I never understood before seeing "Don't Rain on My Parade".  What a relief!

KATE SAYS I think Funny Girl is possibly the first musical I've ever seen where the dialog seems like a distraction from the numbers.

I'm usually all about the dialog/plot. I enjoy the musical numbers, especially if I can sing along, but I tend to treat the musical numbers as breaks in the story. Singin' in the Rain was unusual in this regard since plot and music were almost seamless.

They are not seamless in Funny Girl, and my reaction was that while the plot seemed to go on and on and on and not really lead anywhere, every time Streisand started to sing, the movie's energy level went up about two zillion degrees.

This is in big contrast to Hello Dolly! which is also an extremely long, rambling movie, but manages to stay in tune with Streisand throughout so that "The Parade Passes By" and "It Only Takes a Moment" are not that far apart emotionally.

But Funny Girl starts out full of energy (I love the scene after Fanny gets Ziegfeld's telegram and starts complaining that she hasn't suffered enough), massively drops off about 45 minutes in and then continues to drop even further. I like Omar Sharif and I thought his portrayal of a man who is, quite frankly, utterly out of his league with the ambitious Fanny to be totally believable. But I have no sympathy whatsoever for degenerate gamblers. My reaction to the ending was "Oh, well, yeah, that's no surprise" and then "I watched the whole movie for that?"

But of course, really, the point of the movie is Streisand as Fanny. Which I didn't mind. But it is 2+ hours, over an hour of which is watching people not sing while they slowly do and discuss things. From a very brief perusal, Funny Lady seems to use a similar format: exciting set pieces divided by a rather tepid plot (Funny Lady does include the marvelous Roddy McDowell).

Maybe I'm just a product of the Sesame Street generation except I grew up in a household without a television, and I can sit quite patiently through Shakespeare (even Coriolanus, which I saw with Branagh and Dench; I didn't understand it at all, but boy, it was British-actors-spitting fun!). I think really is comes down to my need for (1) more character development; (2) a narrative arc. Funny Girl is mostly a series of great, funny-to-the-point-of-splitting-your-sides bits with a rambling bunch of exposition smushed in between. 

If nothing else, this list is teaching me that the perfect musical may be harder to come by than even the perfect comedy or perfect drama! So many of the musicals so far have excelled in certain areas but the musical that has it all for all audiences--like The Sound of Music--is kind of the Holy Grail!