"Funny Girl"

Barbra Streisand is a balletic ostrich with an art deco face in this much-beloved, crisply restored William Wyler musical.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Aug. 31, 2001 | When we say that someone has the right look for a period picture, we usually mean that there's something about him or her that captures the essence of a long-lost time: Lillian Gish, say, as a Revolutionary War innocent in "Orphans of the Storm," or Liza Minnelli in "Cabaret." But Barbra Streisand was the perfect choice to play the Florenz Ziegfeld-era comedienne Fanny Brice in "Funny Girl" for another reason: She has an art deco face.

It's a face of Cubist beauty, a landscape of shapes and planes combined in a way that shouldn't add up, and yet somehow make the best kind of visual sense. Even her eyes, outlined in the kohl-thick eyeliner style of 1968, speak of an era even further back: They're the eyes of a Nile princess, a brainy pinup girl from Tutankhamen's tomb, that ancient monument disturbed and opened in 1922, sparking a rage for all things Egyptian. In 1968 Streisand was the face of a new era and an old one: She was a modern beauty whose bold features could reinvent the past before our eyes.

She was gorgeous, she could sing and, perhaps rarest of all, she was funny. Streisand is probably the main reason William Wyler's 1968 "Funny Girl," beautifully made in its own right and now just beginning to make its way to theaters around the country in a crisply restored version, is so well-loved. Not everyone responded to Streisand. There are many who have always found her too abrasive. But the people who fell hard for her in "Funny Girl" -- either the movie, or the earlier Broadway play that made her a star -- are legion. Gay men, straight men, Jewish mothers and their daughters, gentile mothers and their daughters: People felt protective of her ("Poor little meskite from Brooklyn!" Mike Myers' Linda Richman and Madonna cooed over her on "Saturday Night Live" a few seasons back), they were dazzled by her and they simply loved to watch her.

As Pauline Kael said in her review of the movie: "It has been commonly said that the musical 'Funny Girl' was a comfort to people because it carried the message that you do not need to be pretty to succeed. That is nonsense; the 'message' of Barbra Streisand in 'Funny Girl' is that talent is beauty."

"Funny Girl" is a rags-to-riches story that's almost comfortingly traditional, but its very conventionality serves as a blank canvas for Streisand to work on. Her Fanny Brice starts out as a funny, schoolgirlish mouse who gets a gig on a chorus line as unintentional comic relief -- she's great at funny awkwardness, but she's not a straightforward dish, like the other girls.

Her early scenes, particularly one in which she wows an audience as a roller-skating chorus girl who, naturally, can't skate, are a marvel of physical comedy, the natural counterpart to her wickedly on-the-money verbal timing. On those skates, she's like a balletic ostrich on wheels, albeit one embellished with extra feathers and finery; she's almost graceful in a knock-kneed, pigeon-toed kind of way. There's nothing sexual about the way she moves, or the way she grins for the audience after a particularly dorky pratfall. Yet her sexuality is woven firmly but discreetly into the routine: You just know she's the type of girl who laughs in bed when limbs get clumsily tangled or air escapes indiscreetly. Fanny can't be bothered with embarrassment: Self-mockery is so much more fun.

No one in Fanny's boisterous, extended, Lower East Side family (especially her mother, played by Kay Medford, the model of world-weary motherly vitality) thinks she'll ever amount to much. Not that they lack faith in her talent -- they just don't want her to be disappointed if she fails. Of course, she proves them wrong, earning a spot in Florenz Ziegfeld's show, where she stuns the legendary impresario (here played by a prematurely stuffed Walter Pidgeon, who's nonetheless curiously amusing in the role) by singing one of her numbers as a pregnant bride. Ziegfeld is shocked and appalled, but the audience loves it, and it's the beginning of Fanny's blazing success.

Next page: An ode to Streisand's immortal schnoz