Alright already! I bow to popular demand. Here's my entry in the "Imaginary Movie Review Contest":


    (Riding)

From the day when she first opened the Collected Poems (given to her
by her then husband Elliot Gould), Barbra Streisand knew she could
not rest until she had written, produced, directed and starred in a
musical based on the life and work of Laura (Riding) Jackson, but she
did not know it was going to take her until midway in Carter’s second
term, to do so. But as dream projects will, it met difficulties--not least
from Riding herself, who in fact had remained so far out of the
mainstream (without electricity, on a farm in Florida) she had not
even heard of la Barbra; and only relented her principled refusal after
Streisand had camped out in the citrus groves for three entire weeks,
vowing not to budge until. The studio, too, required convincing, as
much for the film score, fashioned with brazen ingenuity by dada-rock
maverick Frank Zappa (replacing Michel Legrand, who had stormed
off after a titanic three-hour battle with Barbra over “The Quids”), as
for the actual words of this undeniably cryptic, albeit fascinating,
Modernist poet of the Twenties. Now (Riding) has arrived, and the
question on everyone’s lips is: was it worth the wait?

It depends. Certainly the conviction is there. From the very first long,
turning, continuous shot of young Laura Reichenthal as she crosses
the bleak winter campus of Cornell University, walks to a subway
station, and rides the train home to her parents’ shabby-genteel
apartment in Brooklyn, all to the off-screen accompaniment of
Streisand crooning (with a spare, almost atonic setting of bagpipes
and xylophone) “Because I Sit Here So”, we are plunged into the
intense inner world of the brilliantly precocious poet, gifted, almost
from birth, with an unshakeable sense of mission and righteousness.
And Barbra, in what can only be described as a vehement and
unrelenting performance, delivers flawlessly. We never for a moment
doubt that she is who she purports to be.

But there’s the rub. What is it, after all, that she’s so sure of; what is
her message to the world? Streisand, presumably, got something out
of these poems, and yet (in my humble opinion) the movie, in simply
placing a number of them in scenes associated with Riding’s life,
rather than persuading the audience that great and precious things
are in the offing, instead more likely will leave them with the feeling
that they are either witnessing one of history’s most self-deluded
artists, or else that they are being teased with revelations which will
never be vouchsafed, here in this ordinary life--the world Riding so
frequently (in her own inimitable and convoluted way) derided and
denied. Paradoxically, a less partisan view might have brought us
closer to the real person, and made her seem more sympathetic.

This might be called a central failing, but I have to allow that the
separate parts of it make for some exquisite moments. “John and I”,
with the blackboard eraser dance and Donald Sutherland as Laura’s
momentary husband Professor Gottschalk, manages to be both
poignant and whimsical; the meeting with the leading poets of The
Fugitives (here I might prefer some other poem than “The Quids”, but
it is chronologically appropriate), where she causes consternation and
awe (Cliff De Young, as Allen Tate, pronounces her “the woman to
save American poetry from the Edna St Vincent Millays”), is as comical
as anything in What’s Up, Doc?

And I even like the short scene in a waterfront bar where Laura,
implored by a drunkenly maudlin Hart Crane (Martin Short) to be
given a poetic task equal to the magnitude of his talent and
ambitions, simply points out the window to the Brooklyn Bridge,
sniffs, and says, “Go for it.”

But the second half of the movie feels indefinably wrong. I think Ryan
O’Neal as the irascible, war-haunted minor poet Robert Graves, is
definitely miscast; he is unable to portray Graves’s essential
seriousness, and as he begins to worship Laura, first in Egypt (prettily
photographed) with his wife (Amy Irving) and four kids, and later back
in England, where they set up an odd menage, not even the rapture of
the music (“Dear Possible” with its clanging gongs and synthesizers,
interrupted by an odd solo on the tin whistle) can communicate the
gospel that more and more Riding’s work comes to resemble. The
images grow increasingly surreal--the St Peter’s Square montage,
with its madcap chases, pantomime arguments, and Chaplinesque
panics by Geoffrey Phibbs (well played by Tom Cruise), ends with
Laura leaping out a fourth-floor window, and floating down (in a cloud
of glittering shards) to the chanted words of “You or You” (plus what
sounds like time-reversed chihuahuas barking?)--only to fade to the
primitive Mallorcan village where Riding, Graves, and a few choice
acolytes have exiled themselves; crickets chime in the stillness.

This is intercut with newsreel-looking footage of the gathering storm
in Europe of the Thirties. While I like “Three Sermons to the Dead”
and even its harpsichord-contrabassoon duet (though spare me a few
of the intercalated power chords--they drop through the song like
tossed bricks), all this solemn, almost cultlike activity never seems to
result in anything tangible. At one point the camera lingers on
Laura’s famous “GOD IS A WOMAN”, written in letters of gold above
her bed. But what good does it do Her? They barely escape, on the
last boat out of Mallorca.

Their flight takes them to England, Switzerland, France, and finally
the Pennsylvania farm of Schuyler & Katherine Jackson (Robert
DeNiro and Jessica Harper, who seem to be acting in separate
movies), where another phantasmagoric sequence takes place. To
“Disclaimer of the Person”, the four Jackson children and the two
couples (joined now by another, played by Harry Dean Stanton and
Teri Garr) perform a dragging, ritualistic pageant that begins with
playfully decorating the house with crepe paper (although the music
is already macabre), then gradually shifts into a shuffling, sidelong
intimidation of Katherine by the rest, and ends with her being carried
off struggling and screaming in a home-made straitjacket.

A quick dissolve, and we find Laura and Schuyler embracing in an
orange grove. She begins to sing, “Come, Words, Away”, and by this
we are to understand that she has renounced both Graves and poetry
for something greater. In the golden light of the setting sun, joined by
Zappa (in the costume of a migrant farm worker, wielding an
incongruously modern cordless electric guitar), Schuyler picks up a
saxophone and they exchange leads until the incandescent climax.
Streisand has never been in better form.

And, just to be sure we get it, an oval opens in the picture and we see
that lovable old rascal Gelat, from Mallorca (Ronald Reagan, out of
retirement just for this) speaking directly to the camera: “You’re so
smart, you could write the dictionary!”

I wonder how far she is along.

--Sylvia Hughes