If you were to meet this woman on the street, you wouldn t have much doubt she was nuts. She has that look in her eye, the one that suggests she can be reasonable one minute and lash out wildly the next. She is so filled with anger that the specific targets hardly matter; the whole world is her target.
Barbra Streisand does a good job of projecting that crazed wildness during the opening scenes of Nuts, but the problem is, the movie doesn t know where to go with it. This is not a movie like One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest, in which madness is seen as an antidote for regimentation. It aims lower and accomplishes less. It s a courtroom drama, with all of the conventional thrusts and parries of the legal system, and because the structure of the movie is so timid, Streisand s madness threatens to overwhelm it.