I Watched Funny Girl Last Night and Hated It

I retired a couple of months ago, so I get to stay up as late as I want and watch whatever I want. Between Netflix, Prime Video and Hulu, I have plenty of choices of quality entertainment, but last night I was finding it difficult to make a choice. After dismissing all the dystopian futures and rom com pap, I scrolled through the Musicals section and discovered “Funny Girl”. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards in 1968 including Best Picture and Best Music. Barbara Streisand tied with Katharine Hepburn winning Best Actress.

It got 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and some of the audience reviews include:

The most magical musical I have ever watched that was made! Everything is flawless and perfect. I was so happy and excited the entire movie. Magnificent!!! 5 stars!

This is one of the most entertaining movies. Barbara is a beautiful so very talented actress. My favorite!!!

Funny Girl is actually the best movie I’ve watched all year.

I can’t believe I’d never seen it. I love Barbara Streisand. I love musicals. I love comedy. I love the mystique of Broadway. The Ziegfeld Follies are legendary. It’s a classic that deserved to be seen. I should have known that I was setting my expectations too high, but what did I have to lose? As it turns out, two and a half hours of my life.

The performances were wonderful. Streisand’s debut was stellar. Her chemistry with Omar Shariff as Nick Arnstein was delightful. Kay Medford as Fanny’s mother deserved her Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The music was charming and the cinematography was stunning. And yet, with all of that going for it, the plot of Funny Girl was an absolute travesty. It was so bad, I looked up the real-life story of Fanny Brice which made me even angrier. With so much excellent material available in her biography, it’s an insult to Ms. Brice and to any aspiring performer to produce such a vapid portrayal.

The life of a great comic is almost always laced with unbelievable tragedy. Isobel Lennart could have dug into the travails of Brice’s ten-year vaudeville career before she was “discovered”. She could have shown the dissonant support her mother provided while Fanny struggled through the many awful backstage experiences that she must have endured. Then there was the three-year marriage to Frank White. What happened there? And Nick Arnstein was a gambler and probably a ladies’ man. That marriage had to have been complicated.

The life of Fanny Brice was filled with depth. She was a strong woman who took control of her career when most men were trying to take advantage of her. She could have had internal struggles with her off stage identity, only feeling alive while on stage. She may have had a pathological need for the adoration of fans and the affirmation it provided. Why not write a story about how she came to grips with her self-image over the course of her 43-year career?

Instead, we get a one-dimensional story. Local girl makes good. Finds immediate success. Meets the man of her dreams and lives a beautiful life with him until her husband hits the inevitable string of bad luck and goes to jail for a fraud scandal. He only gets sentenced to two years so even that isn’t a big deal.

What must Lennart’s pitch have been like? “Yeah, the story is uninspiring. Sure, it completely whitewashes Fanny Brice’s life and there’s no ’there’ there. But we’ve got some great songs. Throw in a bunch of big production numbers and it’ll be a hit!”

I’m telling you, Funny Girl is worse than Cats. One hit does not a great musical make. And don’t get me started on the lyrics of “People”. And now we have to endure a 2022 revival of Funny Girl currently on Broadway. Maybe people just need to be distracted and prefer a fantasy to theatre with guts. God bless ’em. I should have paid more attention to one of the audience reviews that I dismissed as overly harsh.

Later. Don’t regret you missed a great movie.