Most critics like it, and almost all of them like Nick Nolte. Five of the nine reviews are positive, and the praise gathers around the same two things: Nolte’s performance as Tom, which even the harsher reviews single out as the film’s anchor, and Streisand’s handling of Pat Conroy’s large novel. The critics writing on release find her direction assured and unfussy, trimming the book to a lean, old-fashioned romance and stepping back as an actress to let Nolte carry it.
The reservations are about melodrama and the spread is wide. Empire calls it an ambitious but messy sprawl, with too much family trauma, therapy and romance for one film and an irritating subplot about the son. The New Yorker finds the ideas about healing banal. The two negative reviews, Time Out and Slant Magazine, arrive decades later and find the whole thing camp, dated and prettified. The pattern is plain: the kindest reviews are mostly the earliest ones.