1 9 3 7, a New York University. Katy is a communist activist and poor, while she has a crush on Hubbell, a rich lad. After a party, she brings him to her apartment where they spend the night together. Little by little, they hook up. After World War II, Hubbell writes a novel that gets picked up by a producer, and they move to Hollywood for a movie adaptation. However, the McCarthy persecutions against communists start and Hubbell "sells himself out" by allowing the producers to appease the controversial plot points in the novel. Katy gets pregnant, but their differences cause the end of the relationship. Years later, they meet again in New York.
"The Way We Were" is a one-sided romance, a movie that channels all its weight to one character, Katy, while at the same time "stealing" almost all character development from her partner Hubbell, who is barely anything more than just a passive puppet who just jumps from one plot point to another like a stone. Overall, it is a romantic and correct, but standard film that achieves a few more elevated moments exclusively thanks to the excellent performance by Barbra Streisand. Robert Redford was not awarded a thankful role as Hubbell, which narrowed his potentials, except maybe in the sequence set during the McCarthy era when he admits he would rather "sell out" and continue to have his job than starve for ideals, but he is still a good enough actor to make his performance work, for instance in the scene where he confronts Katy for constantly speaking about politics while hanging around with friends: "You don't talk. You lecture". Director Sydney Pollack did not show his skills to the fullest, though a simplistic story with bleak dialogues like this hardly gave even better directors than him their finest hour, whereas the break-up of the protagonists may seem a little bit elusive on the first viewing because the scenes interpreting them (Hubbell getting "blacklisted" for being married to a "communist" wife) were cut and thus a layer for its understanding was quashed. However, upon second viewing, the clues about Katy's problematic communist views are placed throughout the story. The college segment is finely directed, whereas Pollack and Streisand showed their full potentials in at least one beautiful scene: when a drunk Hubbell goes and falls unconscious in Katy's bed, she bashfully goes to the bedroom, takes her clothes off, and lies next to him, naked. Shyly, she looks at him and his shut eyes and has this smile that says more than a thousand words in one of the most magical moments of the 70s, even though it lasts for only a few seconds. The movie is surprisingly simple and honest, but that's probably the reason why it still feels interesting even today, since it aligned itself with the classic age of Hollywood.
Grade;++
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