Pallid Revolution

By J.C.

UPTHE SANDBOX

Directed by IRVIN KERSHNER Screenplay by PAUL ZINDEL

Here is a movie about women's rights that Good Housekeeping might approve. Up the Sandbox stands firm on a woman's supreme fulfillment in childbirth, on motherhood as an almost mystical communion, and on home and family as domestic sacraments. These ideas may be valid, but they should at very least be open to occasional debate and review. As far as this movie is concerned, they are verities carved in granite.

The satire of Up the Sandbox is cozy and gloating. Women who bask in their husbands' success--indeed, live largely for it--are pitied. Any women who might object to having their husbands' lives forever take precedence are scorned as sour neurotics with sexual identity problems. Sandbox continually skirts more serious issues by smugly dwelling on such trivialities.

The heroine relates to the whole question mostly as a strategic matter of home economics. Barbra Streisand appears as Margaret Reynolds, an intermittently harassed mother of two and wife of an up-and-coming professor of political science at Columbia. For once Streisand dispenses with her ritual mugging and piercing line readings; her performance is generally subdued and rather good. The fact that she is never fully believable in the part is due largely to the mistake of casting a superstar as a woman who ought to be not quite anonymous but no more than average.

The movie traipses through Streisand's housewifely fantasies, which range from an anthropological African safari to an interview with Castro, who turns out, in a particularly infelicitous touch, to be a lust-maddened transvestite. Eventually Streisand is subjected to a sort of snit that passes for a nervous breakdown. She packs kids and husband (David Selby) out of the apartment and takes stock, concluding that what she really needs is this one afternoon away from the family, then a great many more children.

Sandbox is so snide, so single-mindedly superficial, that it turns out to be a rather effective tract against what it is touting: it makes having a family look like intellectual suicide. One searches throughout for a bit of humanity, a moment of emotional challenge, and finds only one, in the performance of Lois Smith. Hers is one of those rare talents that makes practically every role she has done memorable: the waitress in East of Eden, for example, or Jack Nicholson's sister in Five Easy Pieces. Here she plays (excellently) a testy working woman, and she is on screen for perhaps two minutes. Thus Up the Sandbox is guilty not only of trivializing a major subject but also of wasting a major talent.

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