For starters, Streisand’s class consists of the best-looking, best-groomed bunch of college students to be seen onscreen, or in reality, since, let’s say, “Tall Story.” The two male principals, Bridges and Brosnan, take up where “The Way We Were” left off in presenting the Jewish wallflower with WASPy dreamboats to moon over, and Rogers looks like she’s had something of a makeover herself as the sister who has always put Rose in the shadows.īacall, posing, rolling her eyes and snapping out the one-liners with consummate skill, is in to play the source of all of Rose’s insecurities, the mother who was drop-dead gorgeous and who never told her kind of funny-looking daughter she was pretty. Every gag, every line and every emotional cue is pitched to the top balcony so no one will miss a thing, and there are quite a few moments of self-examination and discovery where one nearly expects the star to break into song to underline what she is really feeling.Īlthough the ostensible theme of the piece is the old chestnut about how it’s what is inside a person, and not the exterior, that counts, the film’s incessant preoccupation is everyone’s looks.
When Gregory discovers that Rose may now be seeing Alex, it finally makes Gregory into the wild, impassioned, crazy man Rose wants him to be, opening the door to a real marriage at last.įrom the beginning, it is clear that Streisand intends to hit every point squarely on the head and maybe bang it a few extra times for good measure. Curiously, Rose has also acquired a mysterious new sexual confidence along with the new shell and tells her hubby that their old deal is off. When Gregory returns, he becomes thoroughly unglued by his wife’s new blond, aerobicized, bejeweled look. After Gregory resists a major sexual assault one night and subsequently leaves on a European book tour, Rose, with her beautician mother’s enthusiastic participation, takes the big step: She has a complete makeover. Pic’s second half is devoted to Rose’s realization that something is missing and her decision to take drastic action. This isn’t quite what Rose always dreamed about, but since no one ever proposed to her before, she agrees, and they spend a spectacularly awkward wedding night watching “Lawrence of Arabia” on video. Gregory is impressed with the lofty ideals of 12th-century courtly love he has heard Rose expound upon to her adoring students in an English lecture, and after three months (and an hour of screen time) they are enjoying such a splendid “union of souls” that Gregory proposes they get married, with no sex in the equation to mess things up. Through some trickery, he ends up on a “date” with fellow prof Rose Morgan (Streisand), who lives with her hovering mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall), and as much as admits that she’s officially an old maid when her high-glam sister, Claire (Mimi Rogers), marries for the third time, to James Bond er, Alex (Pierce Brosnan), whom Rose secretly covets. Elle Macpherson, no less, and despite being mooned over by all the sauciest girls in his math classes at Columbia, Professor Gregory Larkin (Bridges) feels so desperate for a meaningful relationship not based on sex that he places a personals ad. This is merely the first of many moves to make the picture as easy on the eyes as possible, and all but impossible to watch with a straight face.Īfter being dumped by g.f.
Streisand and scripter Richard LaGravenese have no doubt wisely jettisoned both the knife and the murder and, for starters, have transformed the sniveling, boorish husband into hunky university prof Jeff Bridges.
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