The Prince of Tides

Tom's twin sister attempts suicide in New York. He comes up from South Carolina and begins talking to her therapist. The therapist asks about the family's past; Tom refuses at first, then starts on his own childhood, and the subject of the sessions stops being his sister and becomes him. The subject is not therapy but a man saying his own story out loud for the first time. The event at the centre is withheld for a long stretch and, once told, changes everything retrospectively; the family's agreement to stay silent was built on that single event. The form moves between two places: the marshes of the South and the apartments of New York. The past is warm and golden, the present cold. The contrast is sometimes too pronounced. The most discussed aspect was the awards. The film received seven Oscar nominations including best picture, but Barbra Streisand was not nominated for directing; a film being nominated while the person who directed it was not caused a long argument that year. Nick Nolte plays Tom, Streisand the therapist and Blythe Danner his wife. The source is Pat Conroy's novel. Who it is for: viewers who like early-nineties American melodrama and Nolte. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by the relationship between a therapist and a patient's relative; the objection is fair and the film does not examine it.