Even Manda, it turns out, seems to have been infected with the family curse of financial cluelessness. “You were already doing the bankruptcy thing, anyway,” she tells her mother, by way of defense.īut while the dialogue often has a comic crackle, the characters’ fecklessness is less charmingly kooky than exasperating. Meesh sheepishly - well, actually not so sheepishly - confesses that she charged all those jars of face cream herself, then sold them on eBay. It turns out, however, that the miscreant is in the family. Having lost her job at a tire store, she’s merrily sunken into a state of cheerful denial about her insolvency, preferring to unleash another preposterous tall tale whenever her daughters try to jostle her into facing the situation. Trouble is, Mom doesn’t really have any personal finances anymore. Her younger daughter, Michelle, called Meesh (Anna O’Donoghue) seems to have moved in, while Meesh’s older sister, Amanda, called Manda (Nadia Bowers), is visiting from Chicago in an attempt to help Mom get her personal finances in order.
Awash in unpaid bills and barely able to gather her wits to declare bankruptcy, she nevertheless tries to buck up herself and her two grown daughters with tales of the fortitude and defiance of the pioneers who tamed the western frontier in days of yore.Īs portrayed by the always likable Deirdre O’Connell, Mom, as she is known, lives in a largely abandoned housing tract in Stockton, Calif. The penniless matriarch in Mona Mansour’s monotonous black comedy, “The Way West,” a Labyrinth Theater Company production at the Bank Street Theater, definitely falls into the delusional category. That's sort of thankless, but Redford handles it well.There’s optimistic, and then there’s delusional. The primary purpose of the character is to provide someone into whose life Streisand can enter and then leave. The Redford character perhaps in reaction to the inevitable Streisand performance, is passive and without edges. The way she looks at him (calculating the angles-but tenderly, somehow) is pure Streisand. She's fine in a scene where Hubbell turns up at her apartment drunk, makes love in less than desultory fashion and conks out. She's the brightest, quickest female actress in movies today, inhabiting her characters with a fierce energy and yet able to be touchingly vulnerable.
#The way west movie#
It's easy to forgive the movie a lot because of Streisand. Instead, inexplicably, the movie suddenly and implausibly has them fall out of love-and they split up without resolving anything, particularly the plot. So we're all set up for the big obligatory scene where Katie stands up for principle and Hubbell chickens out at a HUAC hearing. They arrive roughly during the McCarthy period, and of course Katie is outraged in defense of the Hollywood 10 and Hubbell doesn't care. And Hubbell sells his book to Hollywood and follows it West to sell out. So of course they fall in love and get married (Katie alternating between praising Hubbell's mind and his body Hubbell listening attentively). Hubbell, on the other hand, suggests that she find an additional mode of address to supplement her basic one, the impassioned political harangue.Īnyway, they have nothing in common. She can't stand Hubbell's WASP friends with their jokes about Eleanor Roosevelt and their endless weekend cocktail parties. ") and drifts out if the girl has too independent a mind. (We never get to hear much of his fiction, although one story begins, "Like his country, things had come too easily to him," and Katie has no trouble disagreeing with THAT.)įor all of his charms and talents, however, he's basically weak: He drifts into love affairs on the strength of drunken excuses ("Sorry I fell asleep here last night.
Robert Redford plays Hubbell Gardiner, who fascinates Katie because he is not only incredibly handsome and the top athlete on campus, but also writes great fiction for their short story class. Streisand plays Katie Morosky, and when we meet her in the late 1930s, she's the secretary of the campus Young Communist League.
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