MovieChat Forums > The Prince of Tides (1991) Discussion > Unrealistic and Improbable

Unrealistic and Improbable

posted 20 years ago by lauren7312
27 replies | jump to latest

It seems to me the suicidal sister pretty much gets ignored here. Dr. Lowenstein was more into helping Tom than Savannah. Also, it is highly improbable from a legal standpoint that a psychiatrist would interview family members of a patient unless they have consent from the patient. In fact, it's illegal to do this. And seeing that Savannah was doped up and tied down I don't think she consented.

Also, would any psychiatrist really hire one of her patients to teach her son football? LOL. That was a joke. And then the husband invites him to a dinner party? Ha. Maybe these things happen in New York, but not around here. Doctors are usually pretty professional and they don't "hang out" with patients after work and make them surrogate fathers to their kids. LOL.

Where was poor Savannah while Dr. Lowenstein was wining and dining it up with her brother? Tied down in the psych ward? Nice.

The whole movie is pretty improbable, really. It seemed Savannah was the one in real trouble here and she is hardly mentioned. The movie is warm and touching at times, but all the, "yeah rights" keep it from really being a good picture.

[–] jackcarson 20 years ago

I totally agree. I wouldn't have such a big problem if the movie didn't scream THIS IS A SERIOUS ADULT PICTURE at us. If it was serious, Streisand the director would have toned down Streisand the actress. For all her study of the role she is hardly anything like a real psychiatrist. And I thought it was interesting she cast actresses like Blythe Danner and Melinda Dillon - both good but bland, mild blondes compared to her physically.

[–] energy8432 19 years ago

Umm, it's a movie and it's not a movie about the suicidal sister but her brother, that's why we see him and not her for the majority of the movie! I don't think that she was helping Tom more than Savannah but she was using him as a tool.Let's just assume that she got consent from Savannah cuz probably she signed whatever forms put in front of her when she was admitted.

And as far as a psychiatrist hiring a patient to teach her son football, #1, he wasn't her patient and #2, a lot more ridiculous and unethical things happen everyday. Where is "around here"? I'm on the opposite coast of NYC, in a lil small town but I'm sure (no, I know) that this kinda thing is totally NOT farfetched.

Life is improable and nothing is beyond reach. Why would you go to the movies or watch a "MOVIE" and expect that it would be taken out of your everyday life?? That would be such a waste. I know that I see Frankstein and Tom Wingo everyday. Why even bother to turn on the tube? If every movie followed my life experiences, I certainly would not pay to see it on the big screen!!

[–] Louisekelly86 19 years ago

Yeah I agree. Some people eh? It was a book(fiction) meaning not real which was turned into a film! Hard concept to grasp isn't it, that it was a MOVIE. LOL

[–] lauren7312 19 years ago

Yeah, well it was lame anyway.

[–] 19 years ago

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[–] fiatlux-1 19 years ago

Well-said LI Mom.

Did Tom's father apologize? Can't remember what scene that was?

"I offer you this rose...my heart, my soul, my love."
"Love?"
- Legend

[–] 19 years ago

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[–] sapient 19 years ago

the scene where tom brought his girls shrimping on his father's boat was well done.

as the girls are squealing with delight, busily separating the good fish from the "trash" fish, tom glances at father and says, "y'know, they love you, dad".

he looks back at tom, continuing to work, and gives tom a small understanding smile. (pause...) enough of the touchy-feely stuff for this good ole boy, he changes the subject to something safe: how the atlanta braves baseball team will do this year.

i identified so much with this film, because of my own violent father. watching the flashback scenes of tom's childhood, it was almost like reliving some of my own early terrors. the beatings, the threats, the supposedly happy family occasions that turned into hellish fights, it was all too familiar, sadly enough.
-

[–] filmbuff87 19 years ago

it kills me to say this b/c i love streisand but i agree that Tom was being helped more than Savannah. the story is supposed to be about helping savannah but it seems like savannah gets ignored. i geuss the resolution to this would be...

that savannah was to doped up and out of it to be able to continue her sessions, so lowenstein uses tom to figure out why savannah is hurting so much.

...but even then lowenstein takes more of an interest in tom than savannah. you only see lowenstein and tom up at the hospital a few times; the rest of the time you just see lowenstein and tom alone.

i definately think that Streisand got to cauhgt up in the romance part and sorta forgot about the real reason that tom is even in new york....

but then agian you could say that the romance is equally important as the pyschiatry part. b/c not only is savannah ill but tom and lowenstein both have their own problems and through savannah they were able to meet, fall in love, and solve their own domestic troubles.....

theres just a lot to think about when it comes to this movie.......you should really read the book for a full better understanding.

[–] jwells-7 19 years ago

LI MOM, that was actually a damn good synopsis of this movie. I can see the validity behind each of the summations you gave concerning all the characters upon which you commented. Everyone has to remember that this movie is based upon a novel by Pat Conroy. In terms of literature, The Prince of Tides is an excellent piece. The resolutions that these people come to are quite amazing.
I see alot of reality in this movie, and saw even more in the novel. Southerners by nature are quite strong-willed, especially southern women like Lyla. Tom, being the educated man he was, sought to get on with his life, despite his past. His frustration with his mother seems to be affecting his relationship with his wife. It is only when he meets Lowenstein and she helps him heal some of the wounds that continue to sting can he clearly see that his relationship with his wife is more than worth saving. But in order to do that, Lowenstein had to take him back to his past to tell a story that had to be told. It seemed that Lowenstein helped him settle a lot of issues with his father, mother(most importantly, his wife, and himself. Savannah and her hospitalization were just catalysts for that.

[–] renee916 19 years ago

I had a crush on my therapist if that means anything

[–] 19 years ago

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[–] ddeboer 19 years ago

This is a rather unrealistic portrayl of therapy. The real client here was not Savanah at all but her brother. The plot conveniently keeps Savannah restrained and doped up long enough for her brother to practically move to New York and develop a relationship with the therapist when he was only suppose to be answering a few questions. This movie is a romance plain and simple. Everyone is haunted by the romantic notion that we heal those we fall in love with (and vice versa) so why not just make one of those folks a psychiatrist right?

No ethical professional would hang out with her client's brother much less sleep with him. We don't even know how Savanah feels about any of this because she is simply irrelevant even thought she was extreme enough to be restrained for a long period of time.

And George Carlin as a gay guy? Yeah right!

I was surpised they didn't hook up at the end. She was not only an implicit therapist but an implicit sexual surrogate! She was the ultimate romantic martyr.

I thought the movie was silly. It combined therapeutic cliches with our fantasies of romance. Blythe Danner represented the responsible family oriented love while Barbara Streisand represented new and passionate almost life giving love. He is born again after he has had a dose of her. That is probably the most realistic thing in the movie is how some couples are rejuvinated and get along better after an affair. Poor Dr. Lowenstein. She only gets that warm feeling in her heart. Hopefully she charged him or his sister for his sessions.

[–] roghache 19 years ago

I agree that this movie is silly. Films about therapy seldom come across very well with me. Yes, it's odd, in fact downright unethical, that this psychiatrist develops a romantic & sexual relationship with her patient's brother. He became like her own patient, all absurd. Consequently, she's more concerned about him than she is about his suicidal sister...her REAL patient. It would have been better to have made a straight romance out of this tale, and not involved a therapist at all.

[–] danobird 19 years ago

it's annoys me when people cannot open their minds to the concept of a MOVIE...i mean moaning on about how 'it doesn't happen in real life' blah blah blah...it's a goddamn movie people if you want to see real life don't go the the movies...look out your window or sit in the park or something.

if you want to broaden your mind about the possibilities of this life( while at the same time understanding what you are seeing is a fictionalised representation of life) then go to the movies.

uuuggghghghg stupid people make me so maaaaddd!!!

[–] Strausszek 19 years ago

Of course the story is brought into a movie but that doesn't mean you should accept every kind of incoherence. If you do, it more or less confirms what some of the last posters have been onto: a)book and film give a hokey picture of therapy and b)it's really a romance thinly disguised as a mature medical story (I prefer not to use "adult" here since that's got other overtones) of psychosis, grief and redemptive love. To give a few examples, just how would Savannah be helped by her brother telling her psychiatrist in raw detail about that horrific attack on their house, rape and near murder and the way they improbably killed off the intruders by means of the house tiger? My bet is that when Susan tells Savannah, she'd be very disturbed by the fact that Tom's told an outsider and no doubt she would deny much of this, calling Tom names, calling him a liar (and all in good faith). If the doctor's a pro, she'd ask herself too, is Tom really telling the truth or is he trying to make himself interesting?

And more (from th book), just how does the Grandfather's story of being shot down over Germany, being helped by the priest and finally escaping, have anything to do with Savannah or Tom? The book makes a lot out of the fact that the Wingos are the only RC family in the neighborhood, and that Mom resents it, but nothing of the religious bit seems to have anything to do with Savannah's psychosis - though the book is told as if it had. Tom hints mysteriously, "it would be thirty years before I found out he had held back the most vital thing about it" (the fact that Dad killed a farmer woman just after being shot down in Geramny), well as far as I can see, Conroy never properly picks that one up, he just uses it to whet our appetite in reading on.

Put bluntly, I feel both Conroy and Streisand are manipulating people's tear-drenched feelings.

[–] pegarsus9 19 years ago

damn right. of course they're playing with our feelings especially conroy, that's what makes the book good! didn't you here the latest Tool song? i think maynard made a very good point about people man having a very voyeristic nature.

'we all feed
on tradgedy
we won't give pause
till the blood is flowing'

freakin' idiot! napolen dynamite

[–] Strausszek 19 years ago

So if it's a good cry there's no point in consistency, even if the book is 700 pages long and claims to give some sort of full-figure images of the people in it? Sounds a bit like Petals on the Wind etc, though I'd never compare Conroy to Virginia Andrews; he's a far stronger writer.

Still. I think the movie wouldn't have got so much bashing if it hadn't pretty much forced on the audience "Hey this is a MATURE MOVIE, a Serious Drama and not just Beaches." When you present it like that, you need to meet some standards and not just heap up the big box of clichés (for example, Conroy - his novel as well as his script - uses the catholic bit pretty much for its spunky theatre value, candles, prie-dieu position (full kneeling with hands clasped in front - in the novel Savannah and her brothers are placed on the lawn in this position, in drenching rain, to pray to the Virgin Mary for the soul of their unborn sister - this is a positively parodic scene), strange rituals, boxes of myrrh and scents - all exotic to so many Calvinists and Methodists who grew up with relatively bare chapels and reverends speaking in pliain English. No, I'm not RC myself, but I know enough people who are.

Robert Duvall's The Apostle also picks up on a colourful Christian background - gospel/Southern baptists - but he brings those people to the center stage of the movie, he doesn't exploit them. That's the difference. Conroy pushes both Savannah and that whole part into the background, or uses them for trumped-up effects, while he's still professing the story is about her and her brother.

One reason I see the big holes here is, I know somebody who's been through schizophrenia, and it's not something that's cured in three months; the guy I know was barely communicado after four or five months, and after five years it could still be quite hard to make any normal conversation with him. Lowenstein says Savannah is the most comlicated case she's ever seen, but goes off to Maine to bed her brother and leaves Savannah chained up and doped like a monkey at Bellevue months after she was taken in post-suicide attempt. The image of illness and therapy with both Conroy and Streisand is simply ludicrous.

[–] ddeboer 18 years ago

Yes but it is possible to create a great story and still have an accurate portrayl of psychotherapy. Hollywood fails on this opportunity time and time again. The female psychiatrist inevitably falls in love with her client. This is all well documented in the book "Psychiatry and the Cinema". Perhaps there is a lack of faith in the entertainment value of a film that shows a realistic therapist. I just wish they would try more often.

[–] Strausszek 18 years ago

The female psychiatrist inevitably falls in love with her client. This is all well documented in the book "Psychiatry and the Cinema"

In the movies, yes. In non-movie reality, to fall in love with or enter a sexual liaison with your patient is an ultimate breach of ethics in a psychiatrist or a therapist (compare with the outcry over the cases of paedophilia in the Roman catholic clergy).

The story obviously wouldn't be served by stretching it out over several years while Savannah is recovering. Book and film have points of high drama and I don't feel Streisand is that bad all the time, but to me at least the story (both versions) is sucked under by a plot that leaves you clueless about what's really going on with these gifted siblings.

I'd agree that there are some kind of hard walls here that Hollywood seems unable to break in a story, for example in a Hollywood movie, if one of the heroes, the people we're supposed to identify with, abruptly dies or is in a very bad way at the end, that implies (to many people, and to script-writers) that this person is expendable. That's a notion alien to European cinema, and also to Clint Eastwood (Bird; Billon Dollar Baby, though in both of those the death of the hero is a bit outweighed by their previous stardom and success). To do a movie where Susan, at the end, had definitely given up on her passion for Tom, and where Savannah is just unsteadily beginning to recover, would have smashed against those hard limits.

[–] danobird 18 years ago

I don't think that Savannah was fully recovered..nowhere does it claim that. she begins to pick herself up,as she has done lots of times before but that doesn't mean that her life is now going to be a bed of roses.

Also you said earlier something like it didn't help Savannah at all that Tom told Susan about the rapes??? I think it would.One of the biggest tragedys in her life?a most harrowing experience,one would imagine!Of course her doctor needed to know.Would Savannah be mad at Tom?probably but it still is best for her!they had being keeping secrets so long that it was tearing them apart. The truth needed to be told.

While i agree that usually in 'real life' the doc would never fall for her patient blah blah blah...i do think this is a story of love, and hope and releasing yourself from the pain of the past. Is every detail in it what would, or should happen in real life?perhaps not....but it's a story!

would you dislike, in a similar manner the Green Mile, or In America?
Lets try not be cynical about everything........

Oh i won't think about that now.....i'll think about that tomorrow...

[–] judithw100 18 years ago

Fiction doesn't mean "it can't happen." It still has to be within the realm of beleivability, or possibility [unless your name is Dan Brown].

Therapists just might ask a family member for background, and also engage in sexual/love relationships with such a person - it might be unethical to the hilt, but that doesn't mean it cannot happen.

[–] noveltylibrary 18 years ago

I agree. I actually think it would have been a better movie had the sister succeeded in suicide, and then the focus on Tom and the past would be fine.

[–] Strausszek 17 years ago

Yeah, movie and book really push Savannah in the background a bit, while ostensibly it would pretend to be about her history and her road to hell and back.

And no, it's not told as if Savannah has come all the way back to being a sane reasoned person at the end, but she makes an impossibly fast recovery out of the mental black hole (a darkness that had been coming for a long time). She's able to see herself from the putside a bit, to talk about what's been going on. Having known people who suffer from schizophrenia over a long time, I know that getting to even start restoring the normal trust and way of talking and thinking, can take so much longer.

[–] zurichpoet 13 years ago

I thought "unrealistic and improbable" would be in regards to the strange football practices in Central Park. Yes, I've seen someone wearing a helmet there; but they were on more than Gatorade.

[–] mixedmed 12 years ago

Yeah, movie and book really push Savannah in the background a bit, while ostensibly it would pretend to be about her history and her road to hell and back.

Eh...I don't see how the movie or the book ever pretended to be about Savannah. It's crystal clear the that story is really about Tom and how his past affected his life. Savannah was clearly just a catalyst for Tom's story from beginning to end. The book is even written from Tom's POV and the movie is narrated by him.

As for the compressed recovery time for Savannah...yeah, that's pretty much par for the course in most movies, like the murder trial or the historical lawsuit being wrapped up in a nice bow by the end of the movie. Or the murder case magically being solved and the bad guys dead or in jail by the end of the movie. Or, the rags to riches stories, or the medical breakthrough stories, or just about anything that takes a long time in real life, but has to be compressed in a movie for pacing and time restrictions.

[–] manofsteel4455 9 years ago

When did people become such experts on reality anyways?