Streisand the star has so enslaved Streisand the director that she -- the latter -- is no longer free to make the movie that cries out faintly to be made. That movie perhaps already did get made, in France, in the late Fifties, by André Cayatte, under the same name but in soap-operatic mode rather than comic. It told of an unattractive woman who loses her allure for the man in her life after her transformation through plastic surgery. The notion, however, that she could ever under any circumstances lose any allure, to say nothing of the notion that she could use any plastic surgery, is apparently insupportable to Streisand, who has diverted the storyline instead into a you-can-have-it-all (at-least-if-you-are-Barbra-Streisand-you-can) egomaniacal daydream. Certainly for viewers of a mind to play couch doctor, the movie offers a more interesting kind of badness than the average badness of movies. A kind of badness you can chew on. And in the performance of Jeff Bridges, as a Mr. Priss who hopes to prolong Platonic love into married life, it approaches actual goodness. The goodness of the good sport, and the goodness of the good soldier. Playing against his natural tendencies, dressing up in bow ties and woolly pullovers and tweedy jackets, squeezing out a pinched, squeaky, stammering voice, Bridges is snugly in the tradition of the Cary Grant of Bringing Up Baby and Monkey Business, or, extended into Streisand's radius, the Ryan O'Neal of What's Up, Doc? With Lauren Bacall, Mimi Rogers, Pierce Brosnan, George Segal, Brenda Vaccaro. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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