Up the Sandbox

I am not the biggest fan of Barbra Streisand by any means, although I'm willing to give all sorts of different movies a try. So, when TCM showed the movie Up the Sandbox, I decided to record it because the one-sentence description they used sounded interesting enough.

Streisand plays Margaret Reynolds, a mother of two young children living in a Manhattan apartment with her husband Paul (David Selby), who is a history professor at Columbia University. It seems like a happy enough marriage although Margaret also has to do a lot of work with two little ones. Worse, she has a doctor's appointment the next day, and the doctor informs her that she is pregnant with child #3. (Presumably she knew she had missed her period, although I think Hollywood films still weren't really talking about pregnancy that openly in 1972.)

Margaret leaves the doctor's office and goes to her husband's office to tell him the news, only to find that he's talking to another professor, but this one being a female professor. So after Margaret leaves the office without having told Paul about the doctor's appointment because this isn't something you reveal first to strangers, she confronts the other professor: are you and my husband having an affair? And the other professor says, of course we are.

Or maybe that's all in Margaret's mind. On her way home, she stops off at what seems like a public lecture, where a man who is clearly supposed to be Fidel Castro is giving a speech on the state of women in revolutionary societies as opposed to bourgeois capitalist societies. Margaret disagrees with Castro, with the result that the two wind up in a hotel room together where Castro reveals that he is in fact a woman, and a lesbian to boot, who is more than willing to have sex with Margaret.

OK, that's clearly in Margaret's mind, although the film doesn't tell us this directly. Indeed, the film never directly tells us which stuff is in Margaret's mind and which isn't even though it's often obvious as Margaret doesn't suffer the consequences that would befall her if the daydreams were real. Nobody else knows about the fantasies, which include teaming up with a bunch of black revolutionaries to try to bomb the Statue of Liberty; more mundanely telling off her parents; and visiting the Masai with one of Paul's fellow professors (played by Paul Benedict) to learn about their allegedly painless form of childbirth. In and around having these fantasies, Margaret is finding herself decidedly less satisfied with her life as a housewife.

I can see why Barbra Streisand would want to make a movie like Up the Sandbox, although I can also see why the movie was a box office flop. The fantasy sequences are fairly clearly supposed to be comedic, while the rest of Margaret's regular life is more of a straightforward drama. However, the movie never really meshes the two sets of scenes together, with the result that the movie is tonally very uneven in a way that doesn't work to the movie's benefit at all. This is in contrast to a Streisand movie like For Pete's Sake which for me worked because of the absurdity.

However, a lot of Streisand's fans like Up the Sandbox for reasons I can understand. I just didn't like it as much as they did.