‘Prince,’ ‘Canyon’ Succeed in Their Missions

One of the things you learn as a marketing executive or a producer (both being occupations which have kept me busy for more years than I’d care to admit in Calendar) is not to have arguments with film critics.

Indeed, I have talked producers for whom I have worked and studio heads with whom I have been associated out of writing articles of refutation. But it is rare when not just one but two reviews on the same day engender the kind of discomfort in me as have Kenneth Turan’s notices for both “The Prince of Tides” and “Grand Canyon” (Calendar, Dec. 25).

On “Prince of Tides,” Turan, in an admittedly mixed review, hit two special sore points: One, the idea that movies be judged by the novels from which they are adapted, and two, the subject of Barbra Streisand’s ego, as if somehow an artist’s ego, without which she might never have been an artist, is a fit subject for criticism.

With “Grand Canyon,” Turan is a little more subtle, criticizing the film’s director Lawrence Kasdan for making a movie that, in the critic’s words, is “stuck on itself, that cannot hide its own self-satisfaction.”

If the raw edges of Kasdan’s movie didn’t cause Turan to squirm uncomfortably in his seat and if he didn’t respond to the particular precariousness of our lives which Kasdan, as both writer and director, so effectively dramatizes, one wonders in what plastic bubble Turan lives. “Grand Canyon’s” strength is that it is not self-satisfied!

“Prince of Tides,” only Streisand’s second movie as a director, is clearly a tour de force for both the actress and the director (let’s not forget the producer part of her, for getting any motion picture “made” in this town is something of an achievement, no matter who you are).

Turan intimates that Streisand has weighted the movie toward her own persona as an actress, ignoring the leading characters’ relationship as delineated in Pat Conroy’s novel. As Turan points out, more than 2 million people have read Conroy’s novel. But that is a fraction of the number of people who will see Streisand’s movie.

A director owes the book’s author only one thing, in my opinion, and that is to capture the essence of the book for the screen. Streisand has more than done that and as Conroy (who shares screen credit with Becky Johnson on the film) has pointed out, not only in The Times but all over the media, he is very happy with the movie.

Susan Lowenstein’s persona in the novel may be different from Barbra Streisand’s, but the director, casting herself in the leading female role, in no way detracts from the chemistry between her and Nick Nolte. They are opposites; chocolate and vanilla, if you will, and it is the movie’s particular strength that these opposites attract.

Streisand’s casting does, in no way, as Turan purports, “lessen the believability of their initial contact and the effectiveness of their eventual reconciliation.”

A word on Streisand’s ego. In many places, not just in Turan’s review, Streisand’s ego has come into question as it relates to how she serves herself as an actress through her direction. I have never seen Warren Beatty criticized (nor should he be) for his ego as star, director and producer in any of his films.

Was Olivier criticized for the romanticism he brought to “Hamlet” when he directed and starred? Chaplin’s ego was praised, never questioned, when he performed multiple chores on his films. Beatty, Olivier, Chaplin--linked with the name Streisand? Absolutely. There is one small difference between them, but that couldn’t be the reason for the constant hassles. No, of course not.

As for Kasdan and “Grand Canyon,” he has in both his direction and writing (in concert with his wife, Meg) created the most fully realized portrait of the way we live today of any contemporary filmmaker. Maybe Turan doesn’t get to talk to tow truck drivers or immigration lawyers, but they are no more “founts of wisdom” than is the film critic.

All of us have points of view about the troubled and sensitive times in which we live and when we expound on them we are not so much philosophizing as trying to discover for ourselves the answer to the age-old question: “What does it all mean?”

Without that questioning, where would any of us be, Turan included? What Kasdan has done, as did Woody Allen in his all-too-neglected “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” is create his own masterpiece about the rigors, foibles, misadventures and miracles of the times in which we live.

Turan is a sensitive and informed critic and neither of the two reviews in question could be regarded as “pans.” He just happened to miss on each of them.