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In outline, this sounds like a ghetto translation of sex-reversal farce: Tevye meets Tootsie. Yentl mines much judicious merriment from the plight of a girl who wants to prove herself a man but is in love with a man who's in love with the girl she has married. But there are sweet and subtle tones to the comedy. In three versions of the song No Wonder, Yentl muses in derision, then in awe, then in sympathy, on Hadass's domestic graces. Composer Michel Legrand and Lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman have constructed the score as Yentl's running Talmudic commentary on the genesis of her womanly desires. (That's why Patinkin doesn't sing.) The songs begin in a liturgical mode, heavy on recitative and minor chords. As Yentl enters the real world of passion and deceit, the melodies become more secular, and by midpoint, when Yentl's thoughts turn from intellectual to sexual love, the songs are swimming strongly in the American pop mainstream. It is the most romantic, coherent and sophisticated original movie score since Gigi a quarter-century ago; and its treacherous glissandi and searching wit find their ideal interpreter in Streisand's incredible Flexible Flyer of a voice. After two decades of hard work, that voice is still as smooth as mercury poured over dry ice.
Yentl is a big, good-looking movie with only three main characters—a chamber piece played in a Crystal Palace that shivers in the soft focus of sexual ambiguity. As director, Streisand has seen to it that Yentl and Avigdor and Hadass don't get lost in the sumptuous locations and somber, classical mise en scene. Patinkin has harnessed his talent and energy; he can bounce off a bookcase in the thrall of scholarship, or sit tense and still as Avigdor tries to figure out the riddle of Anshel's identity. Amy Irving, of the honeyed voice and witchcrafty allure, makes the role of an old-fashioned woman sexy and smart. And Streisand has fun playing a woman out of her time, a figure of both feminism and fun. In rabbinical drag she could pass for the comic David Brenner; in the tender scenes with Irving, she is the sassy Brooklyn girl coming to appreciate a Jewish Lithuanian princess.
Forget that Yentl is set in Eastern Europe. The film's true locus is the mind of Barbra Streisand, where the familiar conventions of the musical mix easily with the private compulsions of a born-again Jew who happens to be a Hollywood hot shot. On the evidence of Yentl, she has been other women as well: the adoring child listening to her papa, and now telling him what she has learned; the gawky teen-ager eyeing her less gifted rivals; the budding artist stretching the limits of craft and ego; the novice director showing tact and assurance behind the camera; the successful career woman using her power to realize a dream. Three cheers for chutzpah! —By Richard Corliss