Barbra Streisand (1996)

Barbra Streisand’s third film as director is powerful ammunition for those who deride her egomania.  As in her two earlier features, Streisand also stars; as in Yentl (1983), her directing debut, her appearance is crucial to the story.  But The Mirror Has Two Faces is peculiarly objectionable.  It pretends to critique the tyranny of commodified female beauty.  It proves to be an egregious affirmation of Hollywood star power and glamour.  The film, with a dog’s dinner of a script (by Richard LaGravenese), is so consistently overacted, by a gifted cast, that the performances, too, can only be blamed on the director.

The source material is a 1958 French film by André Cayatte, which, from its Wikipedia description, seems to be an altogether more sinister piece.  (From the title onwards:  Le Miroir à deux faces translates properly as ‘The Two-Sided Mirror’.  There’s not necessarily that much difference in the titles but did Streisand and co think the ‘à’ was an ‘a’?)  As in the Cayatte, Streisand’s male protagonist is a professor:  Gregory Larkin (Jeff Bridges), a mathematician at Columbia University, is about to publish a magnum opus years in the making.  Where Cayatte’s heroine is ‘a sensitive and intelligent girl who is physically unattractive’, Rose Morgan (Streisand) is middle-aged and also a Columbia professor, of English literature.  Rose goes down a storm with her students in the lecture theatre.  Outside it, and although the story is presumably happening in the 1990s, she has the life of an unmarried woman of yesteryear – especially Hollywood yesteryear.  She still lives with, and in the shadow of, her controlling, widowed mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall); she has a more conventionally attractive younger sister, Claire (Mimi Rogers), who, at the start of the film, embarks on her third marriage.  The groom, Alex (Pierce Brosnan), dated Rose until he clapped eyes on Claire.

Gregory, after a series of failed relationships and a brief failed marriage, places a personal ad:  ‘Columbia University professor (male) seeks woman interested in common goals and companionship.  Must have PhD and be over thirty-five.  Physical appearance not important!’  Claire responds by sending in Rose’s details and photo, without her sister knowing.  Gregory sneaks into a lecture Rose is giving on courtly love (among other things); sneaking out again before it’s over, he comes away with the wrong message but he phones Rose and asks her out.  They start dating – going for meals, to concerts – and enjoy each other’s company but there’s no physical intimacy.   A few months later, Gregory proposes marriage, making clear that he’s looking for a platonic partnership rather than a physical relationship; he says he’d be willing to have sex occasionally, provided Rose gives him sufficient notice of wanting it.  Rose accepts the offer.  They get married, in a queue of couples waiting to do the same, in New York City Hall.  Sometime later, Rose one morning asks if sex that evening might be a possibility.  Gregory is so shocked he splutters out his breakfast juice but agrees.  When, that night, things start getting passionate, he pulls away and accuses his wife of ‘female manipulation’.  Before he wakes next morning, distraught Rose has left their apartment and returned to her I-told-you-so mother.

After pretending to be a teenage yeshiva boy in Yentl at the age of forty, Barbra Streisand may have decided Rose Morgan was a piece of cake but casting herself in the role skews and muddles the set-up of The Mirror Has Two Faces.  Streisand was fifty-four when the film came out:  she doesn’t quite look it but, since she’s playing a woman whose USP is not taking care with her appearance, she doesn’t seem that much younger.  A bigger problem is that Rose is an Ivy League professor.  As such, she’s a cliché – a bluestocking who knows all about love from books, whose own love life is a failure.  But except for her turn in the lecture theatre – which Streisand relishes:  it’s her one opportunity in the film really to perform – you don’t get any sense of Rose being good at, fulfilled or intellectually excited by her work.  (Her sole friend, Doris (Brenda Vaccaro), also on the faculty at Columbia, is a standard, mildly wisecracking confidante for the leading lady.)  When Rose and Gregory first go out for dinner and he rattles on about prime numbers, she responds with intelligent layperson’s questions but Rose’s brain is expected to take a back seat whenever Streisand feels like doing one of her chaotic klutz routines.  That she does them expertly is beside the point:  we know her too well by this stage in her career, and that she’s just showing off.

Still, Jeff Bridges upstages Streisand when it comes to being miscast.  In the film‘s opening scene, Gregory is in a classroom, writing on a blackboard, failing to engage with his young audience who are yawning behind his back.  (And how:  the most gruesome overacting in the whole film comes from the student extras – whether enthused by Rose’s zany, subversive patter or bored by Gregory, they give it their all.)  His lines suggest he’s meant to be pedantic and self-absorbed but Bridges communicates only that he is, most unusually, straining to do a character.  Gregory is emphatically enthusiastic about his subject but you don’t believe the enthusiasm because it isn’t felt.  Throughout the story, Gregory is oblivious to the effect he has on Rose but Streisand manages the nearly impossible by getting a self-conscious performance from Jeff Bridges.

It’s hard to credit that someone as bright as Rose would accept Gregory’s marriage proposal and Bridges makes it downright incredible.  If you believed Rose was dazzled by Gregory through a combination of his good looks and masterful, strong-willed dynamism – if he delivered the proposal, and the terms and conditions attaching to it, as a directive – then her capitulation might be comedically plausible.  Yet just about the only recognisable thing about Jeff Bridges in this film is his geniality:  he asks for Rose’s hand in a pleasantly clumsy way, without a whisper of the offensive ‘male manipulation’ that the scenario shouts loud.  As Henry, a skirt-chasing anthropologist and Gregory’s buddy, George Segal has a crap role that he doesn’t elevate (but he does make the most of a good, nasty line:  deriding one of his bimbo girlfriends, Henry tells Gregory that he recommended she read A Farewell to Arms and she asked if it was a diet book).  For those with sufficiently long memories, though, Segal’s presence in the film matters:  he’s a persistent reminder of how unconvincing Bridges is as a self-centred pedant, how much better Streisand once was in romantic comedy.  In 1970, Segal partnered her in Herbert Ross’s The Owl and the Pussycat, the screen version of Bill Manhoff’s stage play.  This odd-couple romcom leaves a pungent aftertaste because a prissy man treats an open-hearted woman shabbily; it has that in common with The Mirror Has Two Faces.  Ross’s film is very different in that there’s electricity between the lead actors, and the heroine, although she has cause, doesn’t wallow in being ill-used.

Jeff Bridges gives one of those performances that get me wondering, almost as soon as they’re underway, who’d have been better in the role (at the time the film was made).  Kevin Kline?  William Hurt?  Probably either but I doubt anyone could make much sense of Gregory:  he, too, is a cliché – the egghead who’s an emotional dunce – but a cliché that’s been updated to confounding effect.  The celibate professor, so in love with his scholastic discipline that he hardly notices women, fitted rather neatly into the Hays Code era (Cary Grant’s palaeontologist in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Gary Cooper’s grammarian in Ball of Fire (1941) are famous examples) – but the idea of a forty-year-old (male) virgin was a nearly preposterous idea well before it became the entire comic premise and title of the 2005 Judd Apatow-Steve Carell movie.  It follows that Professor Gregory Larkin has not only a sexual history but a considerable sex drive:  his experience is that sex gets in the way of a decent relationship, hence the personal ad.  Yet Gregory, whenever he finds a woman powerfully attractive, complains of feeling ‘dizzy’ – the kind of euphemism for arousal that returns the character to the 1940s, and has Jeff Bridges doing an awkward sub-Cary Grant number.  Gregory doesn’t, of course, make clear at the time that it’s a dizzy spell that compels him to abort the bedroom session with Rose.  He really doesn’t add up.  If he’s meant to be a complex personality, he’s in the wrong sort of film, given Streisand’s insistence on points being made crudely and everything played broadly.

The Mirror Has Two Faces is now remembered, if at all, as the film for which Lauren Bacall didn’t win the late-career Oscar for Best Supporting Actress that everyone assumed would be hers in 1997.  As she got older, and got by less on her beauty than at the start of her career, Bacall became an overemphatic, not particularly nuanced actress.  For the most part, that’s what Streisand wants here, and gets:  Bacall delivers Hannah Morgan’s acid one-liner putdowns with more panache than variety.  (If she had won the Oscar for this, it really would have been a long-service medal:  it made altogether better sense that the Academy eventually gave her an honorary award, in 2009.)  Even so, Bacall does provide the highlight of The Mirror Has Two Faces.  Rose, after she goes back to Hannah, asks her what it was like to be beautiful.  Her mother pauses thoughtfully before replying, ‘It was wonderful’.  This moment is a showstopper, halting the film in its tracks, lifting it out of itself and into Hollywood history:  the answer seems to come not from Hannah but from the woman playing her.

But so, of course, does the question that prompts the answer – a question wistfully asked, of one of cinema’s classic beauties, by a superstar with famously unconventional looks.  The Mirror Has Two Faces is a bizarre exhibition of Barbra Streisand’s snarled ambivalence on the subject of physical appearance.  That Hannah, despite her years, still works as a beautician seems to reflect not financial need but a refusal to accept that she’s aging.  She still has to look good, and to fish for compliments.  Her priorities and insecurities are presented as part of the wrong-headed cult of glamour and grooming.  Rose isn’t such a simple matter, however.  She walks out on Gregory just as he’s about to go to Europe on a publicity tour for his book.  While he’s away and she’s at her mother’s, Hannah shows to Rose a photograph of an infant.  Rose assumes this is Claire but in fact it’s herself:  as a toddler, she was pretty and she never knew!  The revelation is enough for her to improve her diet, work out in the gym, have her hair frizzed and lightened, and move back to Gregory’s apartment.  When he cuts short his European tour and returns to New York, he’s confronted by the new-look Rose.  He tells her she’s lost a few pounds.  What this means, since Streisand didn’t let herself look overweight even when Rose was a mess (she and her pal Doris both enjoy their food but it shows only on Brenda Vaccaro), is that she’s swapped loose, shapeless clothes for a low-cut, close-fitting dress that emphasises her curves.

This can’t be the intention but it seems reasonable that Gregory doesn’t care for his wife’s makeover.  The unkempt Rose was distinctively attractive; glammed up, she looks generic and denatured.  Once more, she walks out on Gregory and returns to Hannah, who has now embarked on a half-hearted character transformation.  When Claire’s marriage to Alex suddenly ends, he’s bowled over by the repackaged Rose.  His view of her is so transparently insulting that you can’t understand why Rose starts spending time with him again.  Well, you can actually:  it’s so that, in due course, she can see-him-for-what-he-really-is and walk out on Alex, too.  It was never clear whether Gregory immediately liked the look of Rose because he thought she was sexually a non-starter but he now decides he really loves her – though it’s hard to know what that means exactly in the context of this story.  Early one morning, he turns up outside Hannah’s apartment block to tell Rose as much, waking up the neighbours in the process.

Although Streisand directs in bold face with exclamation marks and double underlining, she can be opaque when it suits.  At the start, Rose is and isn’t seeing a man called Barry (Austin Pendleton); she arranges a weekly date with him, then regularly puts him off, to watch baseball on television instead.  Since we’re meant to think she’s scared of getting old alone, it’s not clear why Rose does this, except that Barry is not a looker (though Pendleton is appealing:  he’s the one quietly convincing actor in the film).  At the last minute, The Mirror Has Two Faces is more majorly evasive.  When Rose and Gregory reconcile, she’s just got out of bed and is wearing pyjamas.  This nicely dodges the question of whether, in the happy-ever-after with Gregory, she’ll revert to dowdy clothes and cosmetic inattention or keep up the glamour girl act.

This is a vanity project, in every way and from start to finish.  Even during the closing titles, we’re expected to ignore the credits and, instead, watch Streisand and Bridges do romantic dance moves in the street, in the first light of Rose and Gregory’s new day together.  In 1996, plenty of critics thought this film was one ugly duckling story too many featuring Barbra Streisand and suggested she change the record.  To be fair, she took their advice – at least, she has since concentrated on making records and her musical career.  In the last quarter century, she’s appeared on the cinema screen only in the two Fockers pictures (2004 and 2010) and The Guilt Trip (2012).  Rose Morgan turns into a swan (of sorts).  The Mirror Has Two Faces turned out to be Streisand’s directing swansong.

21 July 2022