1 Long Essay: I Was Told To Watch ‘The Prince Of Tides’

So I did

Jul 28, 2026

I had dinner with old friends—a married couple I am quite fond of—and during a long conversation full of laughter and honesty, I was told to watch the Academy Award-nominated Barbara Streisand-directed romantic drama The Prince of Tides, starring Barbara Streisand and Nick Nolte. And so I did.

Exactly how The Prince of Tides came up isn’t that important. Maybe I was talking about therapy? Or musicals and she brought up Yentl? I just know that at one point, he looked at me and said, “You have got to see The Prince of Tides.” He emphasized the word “got.”

So later that night I rented the movie and watched it.

In 1991, there were two movies about psychiatrists helping Southerners with bad childhoods who weren’t actually their patients. The first was Silence of the Lambs. The second, The Prince of Tides, is a movie about a hunky good ol’ boy who travels to filthy New York City to help his sister’s therapist figure out why she tried to end her own life, only to fall in love with that therapist. I saw only one of those movies, and it was the one about serial killers (Silence of the Lambs, FYI)

Anthony Hopkins’ iconic performance as educated man-eater Hannibal Lecter earned him his first Oscar. Barbara Streisand was not nominated for her performance in The Prince of Tides, and she should have been. She also wasn’t nominated for director, which she should have been, too. Anyway, in 1991 there were two strong therapy archetypes in pop culture: homicidal and fabulous.

The legendary singer-actor-filmmaker stars as Dr. Susan Lowenstein in The Prince of Tides, a big-city psychiatrist. Brilliant. Sensitive. Sexy. She is charming and confident and will make you coffee in her fancy Manhattan office.

Barbara Streisand is the undisputed star of The Prince of Tides even though her character exists only to help Nolte’s character grow, and also to sleep with him and fall in love with him. She is just a prince charming sent to help Nolte’s damsel.

The Prince of Tides is based on Pat Conroy’s bestselling 1986 novel, a celebrated work of pop literature about an American family’s secrets. The movie streamlines the book’s narrative, turning it into a very mature romance between two middle-aged people, with some thoughtful psychobabble snuck in. The therapy dramatized in The Prince of Tides is simplistic and unrealistic, but that’s not the point —a shrink’s couch is a popular and efficient plot point delivery vehicle.

Without it, we’d never learn the awful secret that bonds Nolte’s character and his troubled siblings. And it’s pretty bad.

Nick Nolte’s character, Tom Wingo, is an idealized manly man, a Southern-fried football coach who is cool with his sister’s gay neighbor (a thinly written role played respectfully by comedy legend George Carlin), and her Jewish therapist. The Prince of Tides sells one of my favorite flavors of masculinity: the man with the hard candy shell. For years I thought I was tough on the outside but sensitive on the inside. It turns out I was only half-right.

I’d call Nolte’s Tom Wingo a relic of another time if men weren’t still wrestling with their mental health. Wingo scoffs at therapy from the get-go, and the only reason he opens up to Streisand's character is that she’s trying to solve the mystery of his sister’s suicide attempt, so he plays her game of trauma hide-and-seek. The climax of the movie is his emotional breakdown as he reveals a horrible event in his family’s life that scarred him, his sister, and brother. He then collapses in Dr. Lowenstein’s arms as she whispers, “Cry, cry.”

One of my favorite scenes is a macho confrontation between Wingo and Lowenstein’s horrible, snobbish, faithless husband, a professional violinist. After mocking Nolte’s southern heritage during a penthouse party, Nolte strikes back by threatening to throw his million-dollar Stradivarius off the balcony. This act of unboundaried aggression moves Streisand so much that she goes home with Nolte. I do love a swaggering dick-swinging contest between a redneck and a goody-goody during a fancy dinner party.

As someone who grew up in the South and who moved to New York City as soon as he could, I very much enjoyed the cartoonish Southern and NYC stereotypes in The Prince of Tides. Nolte’s drawl is fickle, showing up whenever it wants, like a cat. But, otherwise, his trademark “lion with a sore throat” roar remains blessedly intact.

It’s obvious that Lowenstein is attracted to his cornpone ways, though. His manners, his humor, and the way he teaches her spoiled son how to play football in Central Park, like a father figure. The relationship between Streisand and Nolte’s characters isn’t completely unethical. He’s never technically her patient. His trauma is his sister’s trauma. He’s not on the couch for himself. He’s being a hero.

To Nolte’s Wingo, therapy is emasculating. It’s what women do; they talk. A real man is strong enough to wrestle his pain, put it in a headlock, lock it in the dungeon of his subconscious, and then learn to ignore its howls. The fact that he’s not her patient makes it easier for Wingo to surrender to Lowenstein. It also helps that he ends up having sex with her in a pile of pillows next to a roaring fire.

Men turn to the women in their lives with their problems. They open up to those they are already sexually and physically intimate with and dump their fears and pain on them. Open communication is a key part of any relationship, but a romantic partner is not a mental health professional. That’s a lot of responsibility and… well… work. Wingo’s fling with Lowenstein doesn’t last — he returns to his philandering wife, and I’m assuming he never returns to therapy.

Lowenstein has cured him, with a mix of traditional talk therapy and coitus.

Streisand isn’t given enough credit as a director. The Prince of Tides is a well-made drama, and the opening scenes depicting Nolte’s childhood on an island off the coast of South Carolina are dreamlike and desolate. I have seen Yentl, of course, and my opinion is simple: It could have used more songs. Otherwise, for its time, it was a very smart rom-com about religion, education, and gender.

But The Prince of Tides? It’s mawkish. Melodramatic. Nolte is charming, and the scenes where he begrudgingly falls in love with the hustle and bustle of New York are entertaining. The movie comes to life whenever Babs is on screen, of course, but that’s because nothing happens without her penetrating questions. It’s an excellent timepiece and a reminder not only of Streisand’s raw star power but her talent behind the camera.

The movie also ends with my second favorite final words in a movie, right after Citizen Kane’s immortal “rosebud.” Nolte has been unburdened — his childhood wounds healed by the Jewish therapist — and is happily reunited with his family, but in a voiceover, he admits that he still carries a certain someone in his heart. There are times when he is driving home that these words come to him in a whisper: “Lowenstein, Lowenstein.”

Bwah-ha-ha. I love it.