As a devoted wife and mother, Barbra Streisand brings fun into her Manhattan household. Playing with her children as she bathes them, teasing husband David Selby with water from a plant as they prepare for bed, or taking her kiddies grocery shopping in their rough neighborhood, she seems to enjoy her life. Her nagging shrew of a mother (the very funny Jane Hoffman) keeps urging her to move out to New Jersey so she can get away from the undesirables in the community. Streisand meets the same moms at her Riverside Park playground on a daily basis for typically boring conversations that would drive any woman bonkers after a while. Before you know it, she is having strange fantasies about her husbands's female colleague, an old college professor of her own, an encounter with a transsexual Fidel Castro & smashing her mother's head into an anniversary cake. She also somehow ends up a terrorist, tipping the Statue of Liberty over with the yet uncompleted original World Trade Centers right in the background, visible with the floors of one of the buildings not yet completed.
An ill-advised drama about one woman's crisis in finding her place in the new world of a new woman, this really delivers no message other than the fact that men and women have to compromise in order to make it work. There are some hysterically funny comments about the red tape of living in New York, where even going to the doctors can be a challenge because of all the red tape. For some reason, the pregnant Streisand decides not to tell her husband that she is expecting their third child and as a result, goes through all of these hallucinations of people she encounters and how she truly does not want to end up like her mother. For me, the highlight of the film was the fantasy sequence at a family anniversary party where mother and daughter get into a cat fight and her reaction to the little girl snapping pictures in everybody's face. It was like watching Elizabeth Taylor with the little girl in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" who truly does get ice cream on her face.
If this is supposed to be a "women's lib" film, the only liberation seems to be the fact that the character has an exciting fantasy life. Some people may truly be disturbed by the whole Statue of Liberty sequence with the Trade Centers in the background, but this being almost 40 years before 9/11, you can't tie the film together with that horrific terrorist attack. The supporting cast consists of some of New York's finest character actors, including Conrad Bain (playing basically the same doctor character he portrayed on "Maude"), musical theatre legend George S. Irving, and two actors from "The Jeffersons"-Isabel Sanford and Paul Benedict, who for some reason ends up in a fantasy sequence with Streisand in Africa. Trying to explain this in writing is difficult, so watching it may be better. You may be perplexed, but you won't be bored.
An ill-advised drama about one woman's crisis in finding her place in the new world of a new woman, this really delivers no message other than the fact that men and women have to compromise in order to make it work. There are some hysterically funny comments about the red tape of living in New York, where even going to the doctors can be a challenge because of all the red tape. For some reason, the pregnant Streisand decides not to tell her husband that she is expecting their third child and as a result, goes through all of these hallucinations of people she encounters and how she truly does not want to end up like her mother. For me, the highlight of the film was the fantasy sequence at a family anniversary party where mother and daughter get into a cat fight and her reaction to the little girl snapping pictures in everybody's face. It was like watching Elizabeth Taylor with the little girl in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" who truly does get ice cream on her face.
If this is supposed to be a "women's lib" film, the only liberation seems to be the fact that the character has an exciting fantasy life. Some people may truly be disturbed by the whole Statue of Liberty sequence with the Trade Centers in the background, but this being almost 40 years before 9/11, you can't tie the film together with that horrific terrorist attack. The supporting cast consists of some of New York's finest character actors, including Conrad Bain (playing basically the same doctor character he portrayed on "Maude"), musical theatre legend George S. Irving, and two actors from "The Jeffersons"-Isabel Sanford and Paul Benedict, who for some reason ends up in a fantasy sequence with Streisand in Africa. Trying to explain this in writing is difficult, so watching it may be better. You may be perplexed, but you won't be bored.