Nuts
First screened in the early 1990s / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: Martin Ritt. Cast: Barbra Streisand, Richard Dreyfuss, Eli Wallach, James Whitmore, Robert Webber, Maureen Stapleton, Karl Malden, Leslie Nielsen, Dakin Matthews, William Prince, Elizabeth Hoffman. Screenplay: Tom Topor (based on his play). In Brief:
Strong team with sturdy technique and heart in the right place, but didactics beat out drama. Streisand's work a mixed bag.
VOR:②
Defending sex workers and their dignity was ahead of popular curve in '87, though decks get stacked and corners cut here. Mostly for Babs fans?
I had remembered Nuts as pretty poor, but it's got a lot going for it, including a punchy, showcased supporting turn from Richard Dreyfuss as the protagonist's lawyer and an excellent, more self-effacing one from James Whitmore as the judge. And, not to bury the obvious lead, Barbra Streisand is also very good, in her Streisand way. As basically always, she makes you wish she'd played more dramatic roles—and more movie roles, period.
Still, her casting is both an asset to the movie (she's forceful, committed, and impossible not to watch) and a gratuitous obstacle, partly because her look is all wrong, way too manicured and aglow for her circumstances. More than that, the kind of good performance she can give, and very much does, isn't the kind this character needs. Claudia feels less like a high-class call girl than a high-class director, giving her actress a credible on-set run-through of how she thinks the part should be played, without ever letting this other woman have a go. (Imagine the different obduracy and anger of Debra Winger, who was originally cast as Claudia. Or, if the filmmakers had really wanted to let sparks fly, imagine Sandra Bernhard.) Another way to say this is that Streisand feels not enough like the character as written and too much like a celebrity actor of worthy motive who heard about this case on NPR, staunchly wanted to correct some public prejudices and stereotypes around sex work, parental abuse, and judicial railroading, and believed that a spirited, high-production-value movie would be the best way, or her best way, to spread the word.
It would have helped if Streisand had accepted to look a little worse—and if she'd stopped dropping the g's from her verbs ("Do ya hear what I'm tellin' you?") because, despite what we see and know of Claudia's background, Streisand thinks this inapposite speaking style will convey toughness, relatability, maybe the "kind" of woman who winds up being victimized. (She's dismantling some biases while revealing others of her own.) I also had a sense that her deepest way into Claudia has less to do with prostitution or survivorship or genuine, five-alarm legal jeopardy than her own, already decades-old fury at being labeled "difficult," and refusing to an arguable fault to take that lying down. It's a sensible resource and personal history for this actress to draw on for this story, but it leaves some important things out.
Still, the fact that we buy and don't buy Claudia, and believe but don't believe Nuts, isn't just the actress's fault. Director Martin Ritt, no doubt taking many notes from Streisand herself, forsakes the story-specific visual textures of movies as varied as Hud, Sounder, Norma Rae, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and opts for something much blander: an anonymous, idealized Filmed Play aesthetic. The lightbulbs all have soft haloes, even in court; so does Streisand, even after pre-trial institutionalization and some forced pharmacology. Ritt has blocked the movie for theater, often from wide and high enough angles that we see how the "stage" is arranged, without actually using the frames or the cuts to tell us a lot, except for who's staring down whom at what moment. Beyond dulling Nuts as cinema, this in-the-round tactic bears a lot of responsibility for why the movie feels more like a public deposition or staged debate than a story.
Still, we could loop back where we started and say, for all the conservatism of its style and the misplaced values on incongruous prettiness, Nuts still makes its case pretty well. Streisand hasn't lost her Katie Morosky gift for selling us vigorously even on ideas of which we're skeptical. Dreyfuss uses his role to express some of our own impatience for what's not working in Claudia's/Streisand's approach, or what's coming on strong in too blatant a way. Karl Malden is either a bizarre or a bravely counter-intuitive choice for his part; evidently, Streisand really resisted him, and for whatever it's worth, he never acted in another feature. Maureen Stapleton, not unusually, overacts in a subtly focus-pulling way, but it works for the character, and she drums up some impressive, unruly feeling—more, maybe, than Streisand, whose outbursts are louder and more frequent but with more air of calculation, of someone calling "cut" at the end.
The passages in Tom Topor's adaptation of own his play that limn the structural misogyny of so many courtrooms, unpack the histories of abuse in so many sex workers' lives, and refuse to apologize for that kind of labor or to ladle it with shame are all sturdy enough to do their jobs. And the filmmakers wisely heed Topor's cue to make Claudia a real pill at her own hearing, even as we see what those tactics are protecting her from psychologically, or trying to. I doubt anyone will strain too much to identify what's forced or put-on in Nuts, but there's a decent helping of truth in it, too. Grade:C+
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you'd like.)
