Up the Sandbox (1972)
Directed by Irvin Kershner

Film Review

Irvin Kershner's characteristically eccentric adaptation of Anne Roiphe's best-selling 1970 novel Up the Sandbox afforded Barbra Streisand one of her most sympathetic screen roles and gave a more tender and thoughtful edge to the sexual revolution that was hammering down on society in the late '60s, early '70s.  As the modern married woman craving more than cosy domesticity, Streisand takes a bold stand against stereotypical representations of contemporary feminism and shows that the quandary faced by women of her generation is a far more complex and unsettling existential matter than a mere clamouring for equal rights with men.  The heroine of Up the Sandbox is seen flailing helplessly in a maelstrom of confusion - the result of outdated social expectations about housewives colliding with trendy notions of what young women should now aspire to in an age which values the rights of the individual above the needs of society.  The film may not be subtle or particularly sophisticated, but it touched a nerve when it was first seen in 1972 and it still feels acutely pertinent, many years after that second wave of feminism came crashing onto the granite beach of bourgeois male complacency.

Likeable and timely as it was, Up the Sandbox is by no means Kershner's finest work, although it probably deserves far more consideration than his later Hollywood blockbusters that made his name - Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Never Say Never Again (1983) and RopCop 2 (1990).  Despite being as near to the Zeitgeist as a work of art can possibly get, the film struggled to turn a profit on its initial release.  This was partly because a large chunk of its generous three million dollar budget was needlessly squandered on a costly location shoot in Kenya, for the filming of one of the heroine's wild fantasy sequences - an expedition to Africa in search of a technique for painless childbirth.  This lengthy digression into self-indulgent Rider Haggard pastiche adds nothing to the film and now appears crass and offensive; if only Kershner had had the good sense to excise it, the film would have benefited greatly.

Fortunately, the yawn-inducing African entry in a series of Walter Mitty-like excursions is the one notable flaw in an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable romp, one that allows Streisand to turn in one of her more engaging and convincing comedy performances as a thoroughly modern miss torn between her domestic duties as a young mother and her yearning for personal fulfilment outside the family home.  Up the Sandbox eschews the usual feminist militancy in favour of something much gentler and, far more palatable - the kind of social satire that hits home more effectively than any amount of well-meaning women's rights tub-thumping.  The film is smart and funny - and as wildly unpredictable as its director, pepped up by the occasional surreal escapade of the kind that abounds in Woody Allen's early films.  The best of these is the sequence in which a Fidel Castro look-a-like attempts to seduce Streisand, revealing some surprising hidden assets as he/she does so.

The film's highpoint is an anniversary party which starts out as a typically naff home video recording of a perfect family gathering before developing into an apocalyptic battle between bourgeois conformity and female emancipation at its most deliriously cartoonish.  This sudden descent into taboo-demolishing anarchy seems to prefigure the entire counter-culture movement of the 1970s, with the old values and attitudes exposed as tawdry flim-flam deserving to be torn down and stamped on, in the manner of a chaotic Mack Sennett farce.  Up the Sandbox is far from being a polished piece of cinema.  It does however make up for its jarringly uneven structure and ill-conceived African detour with its far better judged comic set-pieces and untiring sense of fun.  Kershner earns his auteur spurs in the seductively stylish, entirely visual ending to his film, which conveys far more about Margaret's impossible dilemma than any quantity of well-meaning dialogue.

Film Synopsis

On the face of it, Margaret Reynolds has nothing to complain about. She is a happily married mother of two leading a comfortable, if slightly humdrum, existence in New York City.  The discovery that her husband is seeing another woman coincides with the news that she is pregnant for a third time, and this prompts her into taking stock of her life.  Is she really as happy as she seems?  Is there perhaps something missing from her life?  Unable to confide in her constantly preoccupied husband, Margaret begins having a series of increasingly bizarre fantasies which see her intellectually and physically molested by an ambisexual Central American dictator in the Fidel Castro mould and then participate in a masterfully contrived terrorist plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty.

Margaret's inner turmoil is aggravated many times over when her well-meaning mother-in-law begins pressurising her to move with her young family to the suburbs so that she can fulfil the role of the model housewife more completely.  The young wife realises that she is fast approaching a dangerous crisis point in her life.  How can she reconcile her desire for greater personal freedom with her unstinting devotion to the family she adores?  Does she even have a right to choose?