1968’s Funny Girl, a restored version of which opens in Canada this weekend, may very well be the last bearable movie musical Hollywood ever made. Refugees from Mariah Carrey’s Glitter who find their way in front of a screen playing Funny Girl may well have some trouble comprehending exactly where they’ve landed. But kids will understand this artifact immediately: it’s just like The Little Mermaid, except that it’s done with real people and there’s a hydrogen bomb disguised as a woman at the center of things.
The movie musical was dying of anachronism right about the time Funny Girl was released---if there had been multiplexes at the time, it might just have shared a roof somewhere with Jean-Luc Goddard’s Week-End. Nominally a musical biography of vaudeville and radio star Fanny Brice, Funny Girl survived because it was Barbara Streisand’s Hollywood coming-out. The film made her a superstar and she returns the favor in kind: she is in virtually every scene and her charisma pours out of every frame.
The result, periodically, is emotionally overpowering. Everything in the film’s structure leads us on to a trio of overwhelming moments; each a musical number, all sung by Streisand alone: People, Don’t Rain on My Parade, and My Man. Nothing else in the movie comes close to matching these set-pieces, and in retrospect the rest of the film sometimes feels like an elaborate set-up.
Dramatically this puts a lot of performers in the shade---whatever isn’t within the emotional arc of Streisand’s character ends up superfluous. There are a couple of musical numbers that cry out to be shortened, and as her ultimately good-for-nothing husband Nick Arnstein, Omar Sharif is often left twisting in the wind. He is well-oiled and efficient as a handsome physical presence for Streisand to make eyes at, but ineffective as an emotional presence for her to react to. Unfortunately, Sharif reminds you that a lot of Funny Girl is A Star is Born without James Mason.
Fortunately, at that stage of her career, all-Barbara, all-the-time was just about enough. Funny Girl is a very simple movie---almost like a Dogme 95 presentation by contrast to some current musical entertainments. William Wyler’s direction is understated and motivated by a simple principle: Put somebody magnetic in front of a camera and let her do her thing.
If Funny Girl has become something of a dinosaur wandering through the theaters, it is of value for more than the cinematic paleontologist or the Streisand cultist. The visual medium in the television age has so compellingly become a vehicle for the delivery of real-world horror, that viewers seem no longer able to make the intellectual and emotional leap required to accept people bursting into song on a screen in front of them. The musical survives in the theater and in the animated cartoon---spaces where you park your visions of the real world at the door. But the movie musical is viable only in that psychic space we leave open for nostalgia.
Funny Girl is solid entertainment which at its most rarefied moments is pin-you-to-your-seat exhilarating. (A 26 year-old Barbra Streisand, lit by a single light and singing My Man on a Panavision screen, is more cinematically potent than Arnold Schwarzenegger tearing a jumbo jet apart with his bare hands.)
But it is the movie of the moment because it delivers you to an era before the World Trade Center even existed; a place where you still believed people would break into song on a movie screen just to get something off their chests. A 33 year-old movie musical like Funny Girl is more than just a nostalgic link to a better time. It offers us a glimpse of a more innocent vision of ourselves.
-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2001
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