A Woman on Trial for Her Own Mind
Nuts, released in 1987 and directed by Martin Ritt, is the most serious and challenging of Richard Dreyfuss’s films from that year, and one of the finest dramatic performances of his career. Dreyfuss plays Aaron Levinsky, a court-appointed lawyer who takes on the case of Claudia Draper, played by Barbra Streisand. Claudia, a high-priced call girl, is charged with manslaughter after killing a client who attacked her. Before she can stand trial, the court must decide whether she is mentally competent to do so. Her mother and stepfather want her declared incompetent and committed, a move that would spare her a trial but also strip her of her freedom and her voice. Levinsky’s job is to prove that Claudia, however angry, difficult, and unconventional she may be, is sane enough to stand trial and to tell her own story.
The film is based on Tom Topor’s stage play, and it keeps much of the play’s intensity. Most of the action takes place in courtrooms, in a psychiatric hospital, and in small, tense conversations between lawyer and client. Instead, Nuts asks a difficult question: who gets to decide whether a woman is mad, and what happens when the people who want to declare her mad are the same people who have hurt her? Levinsky begins the case as a professional doing an assignment. He ends it as a man who has come to understand, and to respect, a client the system would prefer to silence.
Dreyfuss as Aaron Levinsky
Aaron Levinsky is a quieter role than many of Dreyfuss’s best-known parts, and that restraint is precisely what makes it so effective. Levinsky is not a grandstanding courtroom orator. He is a working lawyer, slightly rumpled, practical, and initially sceptical. Dreyfuss plays Levinsky’s early impatience honestly. He listens, he takes notes, he tries to get a straight answer, and he is frustrated when Claudia deflects him with jokes or rage. That frustration matters, because it makes his gradual change of mind believable. He does not fall for Claudia in a romantic sense, and he does not adopt her cause out of sentimentality. He changes his mind because the evidence changes it.
As Levinsky digs into Claudia’s history, he uncovers a story of childhood abuse, of a family that protected its reputation rather than its daughter, and of a woman who learned to survive by being loud, sexual, and ungovernable. Dreyfuss lets Levinsky’s growing anger at that history show in small ways: a sharper question in court, a longer pause before answering a psychiatrist, a refusal to accept an easy compromise that would betray his client. He is particularly strong in scenes with Maureen Stapleton, who plays Claudia’s mother Rose, and Karl Malden, who plays her stepfather Arthur Kirk. In those scenes, Levinsky is not just a lawyer cross-examining witnesses. He is a man confronting a family system that has failed Claudia, and Dreyfuss gives that confrontation a moral weight without turning it into a lecture.
A Partnership of Equals
The centre of Nuts is the relationship between Levinsky and Claudia, and it works because Streisand and Dreyfuss treat each other as equals. Streisand’s Claudia is fierce, funny, and exhausting, a woman who uses language as both a weapon and a shield. Dreyfuss does not try to outshine her, and he does not shrink from her. He matches her energy with calm, with humour of his own, and with a willingness to be corrected. Some of the film’s best moments are not in the courtroom at all, but in their private conversations, when Claudia tests Levinsky, insults him, and then, almost reluctantly, trusts him with a piece of the truth. Dreyfuss plays those moments with a patience that feels earned. Levinsky learns to listen to Claudia on her own terms, rather than trying to translate her into the kind of client a court finds sympathetic.
That listening is the film’s argument in miniature. The psychiatrists who examine Claudia, including the character played by Eli Wallach, tend to hear her anger as a symptom. Her family hears it as embarrassment. Levinsky, slowly, learns to hear it as testimony. Dreyfuss makes that learning process visible without overstating it. It is not about winning an argument. It is about making sure a person is heard.
Martin Ritt and the Courtroom Drama
Director Martin Ritt, whose career included Hud, Norma Rae, and The Front, was well suited to this material. He had a long history of films about ordinary people standing up to powerful institutions, and Nuts fits that tradition. Ritt keeps the camera close, lets scenes play at length, and trusts his actors to carry the moral argument. The courtroom scenes are filmed without flashy technique, which suits Dreyfuss’s performance. Levinsky does not win the case with a single brilliant speech. He wins it, if he wins it at all, by patiently assembling a record, by challenging expert opinion, and by insisting that Claudia’s past explains her behaviour without defining her as insane.
Its rewards are different. Streisand received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress, and the film has endured as a serious treatment of competency, abuse, and the way the legal system treats women who refuse to be compliant. For Dreyfuss, it demonstrated a range that his lighter roles sometimes obscured. In the same year that he played a wisecracking detective in Stakeout, he also played a thoughtful, principled lawyer in Nuts, and both performances are fully convincing. That versatility, the ability to move between comedy and courtroom drama within months, is a hallmark of a major screen actor.
Why Levinsky Matters
Nuts remains unsettling because it refuses to offer a tidy ending. Even if Claudia is found competent, she still faces trial. Even if Levinsky proves his point, the family wounds at the centre of the story remain. What the film offers instead is a smaller victory: a woman who has been talked about, diagnosed, and dismissed finally gets to speak for herself, with a lawyer beside her who believes she should be allowed to do so. Dreyfuss embodies that victory without sentimentality. Levinsky is not a saviour. He is a professional who does his job well, and who, in doing it, becomes a better listener and a braver advocate.
For Richard Dreyfuss, Aaron Levinsky stands as a signature role because it distils his greatest strengths as a dramatic actor: intelligence, empathy, moral seriousness, and a refusal to simplify a difficult person. He does not play Levinsky as a hero, but as a man who learns, in public and under pressure, to take his client seriously. In a film about whether a woman is fit to be heard, Dreyfuss gives a performance that is itself an act of listening. That is why Nuts, for all its darkness, still feels hopeful, and why Levinsky remains one of the most honourable characters Dreyfuss ever played.