GOODBYE LOVER
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Warner Bros./Regency Director: Roland Joffe Writer: Ron Peer and Joel Cohen & Alex Sokolow Cast: Patricia Arquette, Dermot Mulroney, Ellen DeGeneres, Mary-Louise Parker, Don Johnson
Do you ever get the impression that people are no damn good? What's that...you say you saw "The Sound of Music," and that proves the opposite? Well, now, I guess everything depends on what you see in the movies, on TV, in cyberspace--now that we all get our impressions of humankind through the media rather than via personal contact. "Goodbye, Lover," for example, uses songs from "The Sound of Music" for the same ironic effect that made the Broadway musical the chief point of hilarity in last year's "Welcome to Woop Woop." The Rodgers and Hammerstein classic of 1959, which ran for 1433 performances in New York, was a treacly bauble even for the 1950s, when everyone was buttoned-up and innocent. How silly the tunes and lyrics sound today in the avaricious 90s, when for the first time in history a guy could actually plot to kill his own brother! And how ingenious to use its strains for incongruously humorous impact in this movie!
"Goodbye, Lover," which includes a fratricidal plot, was introduced to a warm reception at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1998, yet the movie has been sitting in a can on the studio shelf ever since, was scheduled for release in January, 2000, and has finally seen the dark of night on April 16 of this year. Despite its crackling good plot, superior performances, and elaborate design, online critic Michael Dequina feels that "its sensibilities are too warped to appeal to a wide audience." Perhaps this was the Warner Bros.' motive in keeping the goodies locked out of circulation for so long. I have more faith that there's indeed a extensive mass of moviegoers out there--in Europe if not in America--who can identity with the story's most cynical character, Detective Pompano (Ellen DeGeneres). DeGeneres consistently steals every scene she's in with her misanthropic convictions, amusingly putting down her Mormon partner (who gets the last words and the most ironic lines in the movie), Detective Rollins (Ray McKinnon).
Avarice is the subtext that runs throughout the film from the opening moments, as sensuous real estate agent Sandra Dunmore (Patricia Arquette) sprints through some self- improvement tapes which she has committed to memory as she drives to her clients. She alternates by singing along with Julie Andrews, whose honey-tipped voice permeates her home and car. Though hers is a childless, two-career family, her ambitions are dragged down by her alcoholic husband, Jake (Dermot Mulroney). Discouraged by her mate's performance, she conspires murder with her brother-in-law, Ben (Don Johnson), with whom she is having an affair and who is in turn serviced by his mousy assistant in the ad agency, Peggy (Mary-Louise Parker). When bodies begin piling up, Detective Rita Pompano and her partner Rollins use extralegal police tactics to flesh out the killers.
Sharp noir fans in the audience will likely figure out the intricate twists and turns of writer Ron Peer's story, directed with flair by Roland Joffe and stylistically filmed with great attention to detail by Dante Spinotte--who was behind the camera for the less tongue-in-cheek and more graphically brutal "L.A. Confidential." Once you perceive that nothing-- absolutely nothing--is as it seems, you should be able to calculate who's double-dealing whom and whose back will next get the figurative knife. After all, when eight million dollar in insurance money is at stake, you don't expect the character to act quite like Maria Rainer, the postulant at Nonnberg Abbey.
Though some of the curves appear contrived, the film rocks with high-caliber performances especially by Ellen DeGeneres in her signature role as scoffer-laureate, scoring sit-comish hits off her hayseed partner Rollins--who has the strange impression that the police exist to serve and protect the public and are unequivocally capable of doing just that. Patricia Arquette, consistently an endowed performer in such difficult but intriguing indies like "Lost Highway" and "Ed Wood," comes across strikingly as a bad, bad girl while Dermot Mulroney and Don Johnson fill the bill as brothers whose only similarity is their affinity for plotting. "Goodbye Lover" has sharper, more defined lines than "L.A. Confidential." Here is a labyrinthine exercise in film gris balancing tension with tongues-in-cheek to fashioning an ironic, malevolent, acrid and effervescent thriller.
Rated R. Running Time: 102 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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