The Way We Were - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called the film "essentially just a love story, and not sturdy enough to carry the burden of both radical politics and a bittersweet ending." He added, "It's easy to forgive the movie a lot because of Streisand. She's fantastic. She's the brightest, quickest female in movies today, inhabiting her characters with a fierce energy and yet able to be touchingly vulnerable . . . The Redford character perhaps in reaction to the inevitable Streisand performance, is passive and without edges. The primary purpose of the character is to provide someone into whose life Streisand can enter and then leave. That's sort of thankless, but Redford handles it well." In her review, Pauline Kael noted that "the decisive change in the characters' lives which the story hinges on takes place suddenly and hardly makes sense..." She was not the only critic to question the gap in the plot; of the scene in the hospital shortly after Katie gives birth and they part indefinitely, critic Molly Haskell wrote, "She seems to know all about it, but it came as a complete shock to me".

The sloppy editing was exposed in other ways as well; in his review, critic John Simon wrote: "Some things, I suppose, never change, like the necktie Redford wears in two scenes that take place many years apart."

Variety called it "a distended, talky, redundant and moody melodrama" and added, "The overemphasis on Streisand makes the film just another one of those Streisand vehicles where no other elements ever get a chance".

TV Guide awarded the film three out of four stars, calling it "an engrossing, if occasionally ludicrous, hit tearjerker" and "a great campy romance."

Time Out London observed, "ith the script glossing whole areas of confrontation (from the communist '30s to the McCarthy witch-hunts), it often passes into the haze of a nostalgic fashion parade. Although Streisand's liberated Jewish lady is implausible, and emphasises the period setting as just so much dressing, Redford's Fitzgerald-type character . . . is an intriguing trailer for his later Great Gatsby. It's a performance that brings more weight to the film than it deserves, often hinting at depths that are finally skated over".