The Way We Were

directed by Sydney Pollack (1973)

A Valentine's Day viewpoint.

I always dismissed this because I thought it was a sappy romance, mostly because of the super over the top sentimental theme song by Streisand and Marvin Hamlisch - misty water coloured mammaries, gooshing the milk of nostalgia.  It's a great song if you can accommodate the melodramatic melancholia - it won the Academy Award for best song - but the movie is better.  It's sincerely emotional too, but it's trying way harder to be something meaningful rather than simply emotionally evocative.

It spans a number of interesting periods in American history, and is full of lefty, pinko, pedantic scenes that explain and broadly outline the political stances popular at the time it was made - at least those among the dirty commie cultural arbiters in Hollywood - the peace movement, feminism, social justice etc.  Mostly it's done through arguments between Streisand and Redford.  She's starts out a poor, but smart kid, working her way through Harvard on an activist/journalist trip, and he's a wannabe writer who's making his bones.  He's intrigued by her, and she wants him baaad.   She's got a chip on her shoulder over class and has resentment for his pretty boy privilege though, so there's obstacles to their coupling.

I really enjoyed it and I didn't expect that I would. Sydney Pollack is known for making quality flicks though, so I perked up when I saw he was the director.  It's still rich white people problems though.  Really it's a relationship flick, but it aims higher than the majority of what you'll find in the romance genre.  It's steeped in the issues and politics of its time eg. the McCarthy bullshit, and will seem silly and dated in some aspects, but it's a superb document of that era and the viewpoint filter it applies to the immediate past.  I totally appreciate when "issues" are addressed in a plot - it makes a story so much more interesting.

Pollack, Streisand, and Redford

Robert Redford reminds me of Brad Pitt so much in the scenes where he's drunk and Streisand takes him home.  I thought it was such a sign of the times that she'd take advantage of his inebriated state to seduce him, well actually she just crawled into bed with his passed out form and engaged his automatic hump instincts. Wtf eh? Women's lib was in full force in 1973, but she couldn't directly pursue him because that would be too too slutty I guess.

trailer

deleted scenes

whole movie - youtube

RIP Mr. Hamlisch!  You made good musics.