All Night Long (1981), dir. Jean-Claude Tramont
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
Streisand writes in her memoir that she agreed to do All Night Long reluctantly: she had “no particular urge to play a ditzy blond suburban housewife.” But she also realized that she had never played anyone like Cheryl Gibbons before. Cheryl is a browbeaten wife with two ambitions: to hook a married, midlife-crisis-stricken man played by Gene Hackman, and to make it as a singer-songwriter, unaware that she’s short on talent. In one achingly funny scene, Cheryl plays her piano while bloodlessly singing one of her hokey country compositions.
Okay, that makes this movie sound like broad comedy—and Streisand does deliver her lines in a slightly breathy Marilyn Monroe voice—but the performance is exquisitely underplayed. Streisand completely disappears into the role of Cheryl, and not just because she spends much of the film in what looks like a late-period Debbie Reynolds wig and wearing things like a lilac jumpsuit with matching eye shadow.
The Guilt Trip (2012), dir. Anne Fletcher
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
“There was a director, Anne Fletcher, who had been pursuing me for a year to play a Jewish mother,” Streisand writes in My Name Is Barbra. “And she wouldn’t take no for an answer…Plus it was a leading role, which I hadn’t done for a long time.” In The Guilt Trip, Streisand is New Jersey widow Joyce Brewster, who drives cross-country with her son, played by Seth Rogen, who for all intents and purposes is Streisand’s straight man. Streisand had done dithery chatterboxes before, but Joyce is prying, oversharing, and a little provincial; a collector of frog gewgaws who becomes besotted with Las Vegas slot machines. The movie didn’t set the box office on fire, but Streisand’s chemistry with Rogen should have: they’re hilarious together, especially when she’s being a pain in his tuchus.
As of this writing, The Guilt Trip is the last movie Streisand has made. In 2023, when Howard Stern asked her if she would be doing more films, she said that while she wanted to direct again, “I wouldn’t star in another movie. Too much of a pain in the ass, you know? To get your hair done, your makeup…” In her memoir, however, Streisand is wistful about her screen career: “I haven’t been in that many movies…only nineteen…while other actresses who came up at the same time have done fifty or more…Looking back, I feel as if I didn’t fulfill my potential.” Now there’s a Palme d’Or that says otherwise.
