Southern Discomfort  The ads for The Prince of Tides, Barbra
Streisand's latest directorial effort, sell the film as a love
story. But the romance feels secondary, because the story's
really about a rangy South Carolina football coach named Tom
Wingo (Nick Nolte) struggling to understand how his
dysfunctional childhood disfigured the rest of his life.
Streisand and her collaborators have whittled down Pat Conroy's
gorgeous but overwrought 1986 novel into a series of therapeutic
conversations between Nolte and Streisand, whose character, New
York psychiatrist Susan Lowenstein, hopes mining the Wingo
family history will help her efforts to pull Tom's suicidal poet
sister, Savannah, out of a coma.  In its heart of hearts The
Prince of Tides is a simple tale of one man's emotional journey;
Nolte carries the Hollywood baggage surrounding it on his back.
He commands the screen with the effortless skill of Burt
Lancaster or Montgomery Clift: Like those screen giants, Nolte's
so handsome you want to slap him, but he'