Pat Conroy's work often features strong women, and The Prince of Tides is no exception. It is no wonder that Streisand was attracted to this story. Based on his novel, Conroy likewise wrote the screenplay.
Tom is from South Carolina, where his father shrimped and his mother pined for a better life. His father was abusive and his mother manipulative. "I don't know when my parents began their war against each other - but I do know the only prisoners they took were their children." He narrates. Tom and his two siblings grew up in a volatile world where secrets were meant to be kept. But keeping some secrets come with a price.
Now grown, Tom is unhappily married with three daughters. He has a hard time expressing himself and it drives his wife into the arms of another man. His brother is dead and his sister is suicidal. After her most recent attempt, Tom goes to New York, in an attempt to help her by talking to his sister's psychiatrist, Susan.
Once his meetings with Susan start, it becomes clear that Tom is carrying an excessive amount of emotional baggage with him. His father's abuse, and particularly his mothers mind games have left him emotionally crippled. He constantly masks his feelings with jokes and pretends things are alright, even when they are obviously not. Through his sessions with Susan, Tom starts giving up the secrets and in the process begins to save his soul. They also fall in love and begin an affair.
Nick Nolte does the finest work of his career here. He won numerous acting awards for this role, as well as an Oscar nomination. Nelligan likewise received an Oscar nomination. She had the dubious job of making a harpy into a human. I have questioned Streisand's acting before, but here she is quite good. She even gets a great diva moment. At a dinner party she confronts her husbands lover, who just questioned her judgement, "And I can't believe you'd come to my house when everyone knows your fucking my husband."
What does not work in The Prince of Tides is the length. At 132 minutes, the movie needed to be trimmed. It wants so hard to give every character a chance to develop, that it keeps expanding until we know everyone quite well, but we didn't need to. I believe Streisand was too close to the subject to be objective. She stars, directs and produced this. I wonder if the role of Susan's son would have gotten as much screen time had someone other than her real life son Jason, played the part? Why does Tom drop him off at the train station and not one of his parents?
The ending is dragged out. In a beautiful scene, that is reminiscent of the final scene in The Way We Were, Susan crosses a street to talk to Tom, who tells her he is going back to his wife. She drops her paperwork. They hug. They cry. It is a great ending, except it is not the end. For some reason we have to sit through another one of their dates.
The Prince of Tides is almost a sequel to Conroy's, The Great Santini. In both films a southern family, with a domineering father and a strong willed mother, raise a family that includes a sensitive son trying to come into his own. Blythe Danner, coincidently or not, appears in both films. Conroy's stories have the delicate touch of making humans out of monsters, especially when the monsters are family members.
