Best Actor 1991: Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides

Nick Nolte received his first Oscar nomination for portraying Tom Wingo in The Prince of Tides.

The Prince of Tides as a movie is.... wait I erased it from my memory, I'll watch one more time, I'll be right back.......................the horror, the horror.

Anyways Nick Nolte is an actor I will admit, is not a favorite of mine. I just not seen a performance of his that really is all that amazing. It is strange to me that he was a leading man, because he seems to especially have problems with these, and seems like an actor who seems like he would be better as a character actor than a lead actor.

Nolte plays Tom Wingo one of the three children of a very troubled family. He has all sorts of repressed memories from his childhood that leads to troubles in with his own immediate family. Nolte's early indications of the character are just odd, and seem very unnatural. He tries to show Tom as a guy who seems a little off kilter, and has repression, but Nolte failed to do either of these things very well. His mannerisms to show his off kilter problems are weird smiles and such which do not really seem to be correct, and he really he let the movie explain around him that he had repression issues, opposed to Nolte actually showing them in his acting.

Nolte shares many scenes with Barbra Streisand who plays his suicidal sister's and eventually his psychiatrist called Lowenstein. He shares many scenes with Streisand, they are either the dramatic scenes or the romantic scenes together. In the dramatic scenes Nolte offers a very mixed bag of emotions. Many of his scenes where he yells all the time do not really work that well I mean he certainly yells a lot but he does not do all much more than yelling, he plainly adds no substance to his yelling. It just never adds up to emotionally effective scenes, because Nolte simply never seems that distressed about what he is yelling which includes frustrations of his own childhood, and his sisters attempted suicide.  He never seems to be that honestly troubled, keeping Wingo as only really a character as only really emotionally troubled on the surface, and seems fairly artificial.

He does have a few scenes that are better when he quiets down a little bit. I will give him a little credit, his quiet confessions are fairly well done, even if not amazing. His final big confession Nolte does do a fine job with it, but it certainly is wasted since in this movie a person instantly gets over their emotional troubles from talking about them only once, therefore any authenticity from Nolte's confession is automatically wasted. This confession leads to the terrible romantic moments with Streisand. These moments are strange, and absolutely false. Their chemistry is bizarre, and makes little sense, since the relationship makes so little sense. They do not do anything with it and their scenes together are rather cringeworthy at times. He also shares a few scenes with Streisand's real son who plays Lowenstein's son, these scenes are unbearably cheesy, but go along well with the terrible film, and I guess Nolte needed terrible scenes with two generations of Striesands. His overall performance has a few scenes with something to it, but overall he lacks conviction and has some extra bad scenes to make things even worse.