The overacting hall of fame

Babs, we love you, but you’ve never been a subtle actor, except maybe in “Yentl,” a role that required you to fade into the woodwork. But so what? Does anybody want subtle Babs? We want her doing a screen version of her specialty as a singer: belting.

And man, does she belt, musically and dramatically, in “Funny Girl,” the film for which she tied Katharine Hepburn (“The Lion in Winter”) for the Oscar as best actress; I realize it’s an adaptation of a stage musical, but be honest, aren’t there times when you feel like she’s trying to sell you something, and keeps knocking on your front door even after you’ve shut all the blinds and tried to muffle the sound of your own breathing? “What’s Up, Doc?” is a delight, but what a steamroller she is, telegraphing every beguiling or sarcastic or irreverent moment. “Nuts” is just nuts. Even when she’s trying to dial it back, she tends to overdo it. “The Mirror Has Two Faces” could have won her an award for least naturalistic performance as a theoretically real woman. In the therapy scenes from “Prince of Tides,” all she really needed to do to set up the love story was very subtly suggest that Dr. Lowenstein was a bit more delighted by her patient, Nick Nolte’s Tom Wingo, than was healthy; instead her voice and body language tell you “I am interested in this guy in a non-therapeutic way” almost immediately, and there are a couple of moments near the middle of the film where Streisand (who also directed) cuts to herself looking at Tom, and you half-expect the reverse shot to show a gigantic cartoon ice cream cone with a sign around its neck that reads, “Yummy Yummy!”