I actually read the book before I saw the film. While I'll give credit to Streisand to taking what was a 750 page novel and compressing it as well as she did, she really didn't do service to it. The novel spends somewhere between half to sixty percent of its length dealing with the Wingo family history: Tom is there to try and make sense of deranged ramblings in Savannah's note before she killed herself and it takes the entire novel to get there. The relationship between Tom and Lowenstein is much more complicated and in detail, and it makes very clear that while Tom's confession does much to help him, the novel offers no pat solutions that this will fix everything. Indeed, the novels makes it very clear that tOM's mother may never realize the damage she's done to her family and it is with Tom's abusive father that their might be light.

I suspect that Streisand, much like she did for so many of her other projects, found a critical role in it and enlarged it for her own vanity. At best in the novel Lowenstein is a supporting character, someone whose affair with Tom is theraputic for both of them. I honestly feel Streisand's performance does much to way down the film, the remaining acting, not just Nick Nolte but Kate Nelligan and Blythe Danner are magnificent. I don't entirely blame Streisand for the problems with the film: this is a novel that I actually wouldn't mind seeing adapting for a limited series as it would have played much better than any film adaptation. But Streisand did what she did in every project she either directed or produced: she took too much of the focus of the story on herself. For all Streisand's many gifts, I've never felt she was a gifted director and it shows in this film. I know Streisand's fans will burn me in effigy for this, but this film might have been a masterpiece in the hand sof any other director.