The adjectival title can serve even better as an interjectional critique of the whole show. There is an interesting premise to do with an accused murderess who must fight against the best-meant advice of lawyers and parents in order to prove her mental competency to stand trial. But all initial interest has to scramble out of the path of the all-stops-out, gale-force, gamut-running, Academy Award-lusting lead performance of Barbra Streisand. And the heavyweight supporting cast (Richard Dreyfuss, Karl Malden, Maureen Stapleton, James Whitmore, Eli Wallach, Robert Webber) can but turn up their coat collars and tilt into the wind. The basic miscasting of the central role and the self-delusion of the star/producer who selected it for herself become most painfully evident when the character -- a $500-an-hour call girl -- turns on her professional charms, which means among other things turning on the oscillator in her waterbed lips, for the District Attorney under cross-examination on the witness stand. An actress of doubtful pulchritude even when fifteen or twenty years shy of middle age -- even when playing the deodorized hooker of The Owl and the Pussycat, for instance -- and too highly, glintingly, blindingly polished a star ever to disappear inside any role, she is now only adding another definition to her already scroll-length elucidation of the concept of chutzpah, when she passes herself off as a woman to make a man "hate" all other women. She doesn't mean that in the way you would assume she must mean it. Directed by Martin Ritt. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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