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KILLHER STUFF Playing a hooker in The Owl and the Pussycat with brassy ease, Barbra Streisand must have thought she could strike gold again by playing another, this one more upscale, in Nuts. Instead, we get The Call Girl Dials Snake Pit. Such shocking drivel we watch out of disbelief. As the movie starts, Babs is already in jail, about to be arraigned for the murder of a john—Leslie Nielson as you’ve never seen him before or since. In the courtroom, ready to face the judge, Babs sees her parents—Maureen Stapleton and stepfather—and the audience immediately suspects something’s fishy when creepy stepdaddy is creepy Karl Malden. Babs becomes incensed over how they’ve fixed it with the lawyers so she won’t go to trial. It’s the nuthouse for a while—a charitable prison term. Uh-uh for Babs; refusing to plead insanity, insisting it was self-defense, she wants a new lawyer and a trial. The proceedings become Sybil in reverse: instead of mommie dearest torturing her into anti-social behavior, it’s the AmEx salesman no one should be staying home alone with. You’d have to be on Ken Starr’s legal team not to know; you’d also have to have zilch respect for Babs’s talents to accept her in this shit. Directed by Martin Ritt? This feels like a Babs-instigated coup d’état. Is it an accident that only in comedies Babs gets her man? Don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m fed up with her martyr act. Co-starring Nick Nolte, The Prince of Tides, the 1991 version of Ordinary People and On Golden Pond, is a nincompoop downer; though these two belong together, we’re told it’s not gonna happen because Nolte’s estranged wife changes her mind and wants him back. It doesn’t even make sense as soap—who’d want the cold, indifferent bitch? The only way out of potential legal and ethical morass headshrinker Babs finds herself in—she commits several breaches—is to marry her patient. Not only does she use his family to help resolve the drama traumas, and in the process treats him for his, she also plots to put him to use in butching up her violin-playing son. Psychoswampy it is, yet when the best moment is about dog food, what else can you do but sniff the can? Soon we’re tossing it and everything else in the trash to spend time on Babs looking this sexy. Her imperfect teeth, oddly creased lips, skinny legs (possibly leg double Shelley Michelle’s?), fleshy torso make for a most perplexingly attractive camera subject: you can’t really fathom how it is she commands such visual interest. Not the kind of stunning and cleavaged star presence she exhibited as Melinda during the “Love With All the Trimmings” sequence in On A Clear Day, or the far removes of the hoot couture of Fanny Brice, or in the comedies too regularly exacerbating her often stark homeliness, but as a healthy package of middle-age confidence and defiance accentuating the limitations. And Nolte is tanned, revitalizingly blond and deboozed; has he ever been this physically magnetic? When not perfunctorizing the schlockisms, they’re a marvelous match. When the psychic ills turns heavy, however, she can’t muster up any depth and Nolte goes shrill on us. What’s happened to our better American actors thinking they have to scream at the top of their lungs? We’re grateful during the movie’s major revelation, Babs the director holds Nolte down to what, in comparison to his outbursts elsewhere, are whispers. All for naught: during the disclosure, a viewer shouted out what we’re waiting for Doc Babs to ask: “What did the third guy do?” Her choice of this material seems to have been prompted by Robert Redford unlocking family secrets turning into award-winning ego pumps for superstars who pretend to have this degree of solemnity about psychobabble. But they never get it: like Ordinary People and Mark Rydell’s On Golden Pond, The Prince of Tides is about the dangers of constipation. Stock up on Exlax. Babs got the kind of critical and public reaction she deserved for The Mirror Has Two Faces. It’s the hoary Cinderella story she’s not only too brainy for, there’s nothing she can do to get us to accept her as dumpy, bookish Rose (or as anyone else) because there isn’t a moviegoer out there who doesn’t see the superstar as anyone but who she is. When your fame overshadows intentions—in this embarrassing scenario, trying to be just like the rest of us—you end up making a mawkish vanity production putting audiences into derisive moods. We start mocking in record time: “Is it possible this early in for her whoring to get any lower?” I clocked it: about every five minutes, there’s another new low. Lauren Bacall has been set up to live off her old 40s glossies, strategically framed, confirming there’s no trick these two broads won’t exploit. (We’re reminded of Warren Beatty’s insufferable Love Affair, which career-wise also hit record numbers of no-nos.) Watching Babs and Jeff Bridges overwork the Richard LaGravenese puerility would otherwise be career killers but it frequently happens twaddle inherits a pot-prone audience savoring the abjection, about the best the director can hope for. (I must have run out of grass.) What she’s done to Bridges is an abject crime: forced to push every dumb, overwritten line, he becomes intolerably his brother Beau. The only explanation for Mirror is Babs strolling through in her wonderland basement of memorabilia, conjuring the applause she’ll get as a dull wallflower out of a romance novel, never giving pre-thought to the inevitable putdowns coming for once again shitting on herself. While undeniably the greatest singing star American entertainment has ever known, and who can be quite the crackerjack in comedy and fairly decent in drama—when she’s not in charge—Babs did grow concerned enough about the reactions to Mirror to call retired New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael, an early champion, for hers. Don’t know what Pauline specifically said—reportedly it wasn’t favorable—but, as a longtime reader, here’s an educated guess: “This isn’t killer stuff, Honey, it’s killHer stuff.” Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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