A meticulous labour of love from our beloved perfectionist, Yentl is, sadly, imperfect. A beautifully rendered but strange swirl of genres, media and Streisand's own past performances and incarnations, Yentl is an interesting and beautiful-looking would-be masterwork from a then first-time director, but like Yentl herself, the movie is constantly in search of who and what it is, only finds itself thwarted by certain circumstances, and sails off the screen still searching, leaving us unsatisfied rather than uplifted.
Barbra summed up the story of Yentl most succinctly in her 1994 concert before launching into a spine-tingling medley of the film's three strongest songs: "Yentl, as some of you know, is the story of a girl in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century when the world of study belonged only to men. But Yentl's father, recognizing her thirst for knowledge, taught her secretly, and after his death, in order to continue her studies, she had no choice but to go out into the world disguised as a man." (Cue: "Papa, Can You Hear Me" and scattered applause.) Once there, re-named as Anshel, she meets a man who she falls in love with, called Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin), but it turns out he's already in love with another girl, Hadass (Amy Irving). So he can continue to see his girl, Avigdor talks Anshel into marrying Hadass, which Anshel/Yentl does, but of course, the truths eventually surface.
The Good The music. Though coyly taglined with "A Film With Music" Yentl is, essentially, an old-fashioned musical with a knockout score and several show stopping tunes. Michael Legrand's lush song score won an Oscar while two songs from the film ("Papa, Can You Hear Me?", "The Way He Makes Me Feel") which Legrand co-wrote with Alan & Marilyn Bergman) won Oscar nominations and have become Streisand standards. The beautifully candlelit-looking scene where Yentl wanders in the woods while singing "Papa" is exquisite, and though we'll get to the problems with the staging of the closing scene later, her delivery of the grandly climactic "A Piece of Sky" sees Streisand at her supersonic best.
Barbra. Apparently, during a 1979 visit to her father's grave in Queens, Streisand noticed the name "Anshel" on a nearby tombstone, subsequently visited a psychic who channeled four words: Barbra, Sorry, Sing, Proud, and Streisand took these omens as greenlights to roll her dream production ASAP. Fresh from her separation from Jon Peters and her ridiculous impersonation of a rock singer in their joint-produced A Star Is Born and the disastrous All Night Long, Streisand flew to Europe to shoot Yentl after Orion studios agreed to finance the project if Streisand would make it a musical, star in it and direct it.
Gone was the Peters perm and collaborations with Barry Gibb (not that there was anything wrong with either) and in came Streisand's (so-far permanent) fusion of her work with her own personal belief system. While this has subsequently dragged her, on occasion, into career missteps and the verge of egomaniacal sanctimony (criticisms she countered in 1991 by saying that "I do have a singleness of purpose, and anyone who doesn't like it can lump it), here it resulted in a round-the-clock attention to detail (at one point Streisand is claimed to have felt she was going to "die" from the pressure to complete the film on time) and gave the movie a rare thing in movies: a soul. Lighting, costumes and the Oscar-nominated set designs are exquisite and unlike other impersonal period dramas of the day such as A Passage To India or Fanny and Alexander there's a richness of personal engagement evident in every scene. Like The Prince of Tides flickering-candle orange dominates the film's palette and is complemented with chocolate browns, flesh tones and the rustic shades of donkey carts and ivory lace clothing. Yentl looks great, and for the most part, feels real.
The Bad Mandy Patinkin. A critical error was the casting of Mandy Patinkin as Avigdor. A fine singer-actor, he has all the credentials for the role, but his hirsute masculinity is death to Streisand's visual believability as a male at his side. Six foot tall, Patinkin won a Tony Award in 1980 for playing Che Guevara in "Evita", and the last thing a 5'5" iconic female needs to play opposite when she's playing a secret-tranvestite boy by taping down her boobs and wearing a short wig is a hairy alpha-male towering over her every move. It just doesn't work, and apart from the story telling us so, there's no apparent reason why Yentl falls in love with Avigdor as Streisand and Patinkin don't seem to be tuned into each other at all.
Barbra. With all respect to Streisand's passion for the material, the role of Anshel/Yentl is a very queer, indeed transvestite role. A female character cuts off her hair, binds her breasts flat and wilfully tries to "pass" as a man to the point that she marries a woman (Steven Spielberg's then wife Irving), tongue kisses her and negotiates a tricky wedding night scene. This is not Tootsie territory here: the role of Yentl, played by Streisand of all people, may have an earnest, non-gay non-queer reason for cross dressing, but she is as queer as a cat's fart, yet Barbra plays it straight. Streisand avoids the overt psycho-sexual thread of the material altogether and so scenes where she has to mask her desire for Avigdor, feign manliness and physical attraction to her wife fall flat. Camille Paglia observed that in the wedding night scene, Irving was "meltingly sexual" but that Streisand "pulled her punches" avoiding not only Yentl's male side but Streisand's own autocratic, ballsy masculine side.
Yentl never looks or acts anything other than Streisand playing Yentl. She doesn't immerse herself in the experience of being, for all intents, appearances and purposes, the opposite gender and it may be for this reason that she was so famously shut out of a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the role.
Pacing. Even the three-act morbidity of Les Miserables occasionally mixed it up with a comic up-tempo scene, or a bullet-blasting, thrilling conflict sequence. There's nothing of the kind in Yentl, and even major Barbra Queens must surely sense sedation as the film drifts between big numbers across Yentl's hopeless situation and her one setback after the next. I know I did. Again, this is where the gender cross could have sparked interest but as mentioned, this is an element of the film that Streisand disappointingly underplayed.
The Ugly The Finish. Though there's no faulting the music - "A Piece of Sky" is one of Streisand's greatest recordings - as many critics noted, her belting it out from the stern of a ferry is such a direct visual quote from Funny Girl that it verges on plagiarism. Such an overdone Broadway finale had no place in what had been a delicate film and Streisand's announcement to the world that she had cut free from her roots and was now a major film-making force were completely sunk by this complete and utter, and almost cowardly reversion to her late-1960s Arrival and almost certainly struck her off most Oscar-voters' Best Director lists. Why half-kill yourself making a film from your heart that is meant to show the world the new and unexpected phase of your career only to end it the way you started out twenty-five years ago?
The end of Yentl has no consonance with the rest of the film, as Streisand moves through a boat full of immigrants heading for the New World singing a MAJOR belt while all around her don't appear to notice. We collapse back into Broadway at the end of Yentl and while this regression was great for Streisand fans, who were further rewarded with her superlative The Broadway Album a couple of years later, it's no good for Yentl or Streisand who end up, after all their efforts to break into a forbidden world ruled by men, morphing back into a Diva gripping on to a piece of gigantic moving scenery as she sings the big finale.
