Singer, actress, superstar… Capturing the magic of Barbra Streisand on film
A concert movie plays to the performer’s strengths – and stirs up memories, finds Glenn Kenny
Barbra Streisand, long a pop culture law unto herself, affects some winning modesty at the beginning of Barbra: The Music … the Mem’ries … the Magic!, a concert film now streaming on Netflix. After landing in Miami on a private jet, she enters the loading area of the American Airlines Arena and is shown to an ice cream van. “What kind of tour has an ice cream truck?” Streisand asks in mock wonderment, before deciding she’d like to sample the mocha java flavour.
A few brief testimonials from her music director and her long-time manager later, the show begins. Directed by Streisand and veteran music filmmaker Jim Gable, it is a relatively straightforward chronicle – and, if you’re watching closely enough, a bracing lesson in how far the concert movie has progressed since Martin Scorsese raised the bar for the genre with The Last Waltz, his 1978 documentary about The Band, and Jonathan Demme raised it higher still with Stop Making Sense, his 1984 Talking Heads film.
The theme of Streisand’s show, filmed last December in Miami, is summed up in its title. It’s a bit of a nostalgiafest. Streisand has long struggled with stage fright, but you’d never know it from the easy, relaxed way she interacts with her adoring audience before belting out her opening number, The Way We Were. (Whether she still deals with stage fright or not, Streisand appears very confident in her self-presentation backstage; in the preshow section, she sits before a mirror and tells the camera how she has always done her own make-up, reminiscing about convincing the make-up artist on her debut film, Funny Girl, that Streisand really did know best.)
A mezzo-soprano of what you might call widescreen expressiveness, Streisand has a little more grit and grain in her voice than she used to, but like the master that she is, she makes it work for her. And when she brings her songs to their big moments – she does excel at those that are meant to be acted as well as sung, like Stephen Sondheim’s Being Alive – the movie delivers a montage assembled from the views of multiple cameras, one swooping in on Streisand, another pulling back, another fixed in closeup, another taking in the band, before finally settling on a shot of an understandably ecstatic audience.
The show itself is both intimate and grand. Streisand sits herself at a little table with a teapot and cup atop it and tells stories before and after the songs. “To give you an idea of how long ago that was,” she says after one anecdote, “it was when a tweet was what a bird did, and the only people who had cell numbers were in jail.” That’s typical of her patter.
She’ll also sit near a piano. But when she’s going for big effects, her tech department delivers, including a simulated a lightning storm during Papa, Can You Hear Me? a song from the 1983 film Yentl.
A lot of the memories she addresses in the show are movie-related. Streisand was a defining leading lady in ‘60s, ‘70s and even ‘80s films, stretching across various genres.
She speaks with genuine reverence for William Wyler, who directed Funny Girl (1968), adapted from the 1964 Broadway show that made her a star. She remembers his openness to her ideas. She also pays brief tribute to Harry Stradling Snr, the cinematographer for Funny Girl and three subsequent films she starred in.
Elsewhere, a video montage of stills shows Streisand consulting with the directors Peter Bogdanovich in What’s Up, Doc?, Irvin Kershner in Up the Sandbox, and Sydney Pollack in The Way We Were.
Those collaborations were part of her road to taking up directing, which she first did with Yentl – though she had become a producer well before that, with the 1976 film A Star Is Born. During her chat with the audience, she brings up a 1987 movie, Nuts, a drama she also produced (she plays a prostitute on trial for killing a john). “Interesting picture, wasn’t it?” she says to the audience.
It’s in one respect the sign of a true star that every picture he or she is in, good or bad, is always interesting. That’s the case with Streisand. But one side effect of watching Barbra: The Music … the Mem’ries … the Magic! was to make me want to catch up on some of her films, and there aren’t any on Netflix. (The company has made some progress in programming synergy: Upon releasing Our Souls at Night, starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, the streaming service also ran Barefoot in the Park and The Electric Horseman, older films featuring both actors. But more can be done, obviously.) © NYT 2017
A lot of the memories she addresses are movie-related