I have run out of viable excuses for my continuing obsession with the Robert Redford/Barbra Streisand film, The Way We Were. I can’t even imagine how many times I have seen it, but by now the total has to register in the dozens. It’s ridiculous – and I say that of both my fixation and of the film.
First off, my willing suspension of disbelief simply cannot stretch as far as making the forty-something Redford a young university student. And Streisand, with her Streisand hair and her Streisand fingernails and her Streisand mannerisms and her Streisand pretensions...is never quite believable in any period piece. (I think now of her in The Prince of Tides and in Nuts, which are not – or not yet – period pieces – and oh my.)
Worse, for all that I have seen it, with each renewed viewing most of the scenes feel brand new. I ask myself – as I did today when I once again came upon TWWW on Turner Classic Movies – how can this possibly be? I mean, when I tuned into Arthur the other day (a movie I haven’t seen since the eighties) not only did I remember most of the scenes, but I could quote lines word for word.
Then it hit me. It’s the music.
As much as I thrill to (Pablo’s version), “Once in your life you find a wife” (that’s what he said) (he was four years old) from Arthur, I can’t think of many scores or lyrics as stirring as “Memories, misty water-coloured memories...of the way we were.”
So taken up am I by the sound and the passion, so in keeping with the theme...memories memories memories...so sentimental am I, that once the music gets rolling, my thoughts start spinning slowly backward to my own days of youth and happiness and unhappiness and passion (Ban the bomb! thrills me every time I hear it, however) and to the what ifs and what might have beens and the what wases (pronounced wuzzes) and the what I could have beens and the what I never, ever was – so lost in personal thought am I, that Hubbell (who burdens their child with a name like Hubbell? Wood nymphs?) is one minute tying K-K-K-Katie’s shoelace and the next lying back on a sailboat remembering his own best days of a marriage now gone sour.
In other words, I miss most of the movie, and know it, at best, in snippets: little bits of parsing here and there; overly stylized, anachronistic costumes; woody bars and elite parties; hints of the Hollywood ten. And only today, after all these years of viewing and reviewing, have I come to understand why.
Only today did I actually see Hubbell kiss Katie, the two of them lying on the floor of her apartment. Only today did I watch the wistful agony cross James Woods’s face. Only today did I understand that what I have missed all these years is not a subtle sign of Asperger’s Syndrome (although the fact that I have not got an eidetic memory counters any logic I am trying to bring to my argument) or Attention Deficit Disorder.
No. It was, and is, the music—what the music evokes. And how clever is that? If the music is doing the thing that the music speaks (or in this instance, sings) to – in this case, memory – how then could a person not be driven to watch this film time and time again – each time finding herself carried away on a wave of maudlin abstraction – each time unaware of the minutiae of the story?
I had no idea.
And now I keep repeating the sentiment.
But if you knew how much time I have spent wondering why I have remembered the same highlights over and over...and nothing else...well, Shakespeare was right.
The only problem with this is now that I realize why I have missed so much of the movie, I wonder: will I be able to stomach the (whole) thing again? Along with being constantly annoyed by the seventies’ twist on the forties, what else is there in the film that is going to render me speechless? What other small details will cause me to either wring my hands or throw them up in despair? How long before I actually get up and toss the TV through the window? Or how long before I haul myself out the door, into the car, off to the mall and buy the music – which is what I ought to have done 496 viewings ago.
Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind...
