BEFORE: I've still got some Neil Simon-based films left, after TCM ran a bunch of them in January. The Robert Redford chain took care of some of them, and the upcoming Jack Lemmon film will handle most of the rest, leaving me with "The Goodbye Girl" to cross off the list, with Richard Dreyfuss carrying over from "Another Stakeout". One line of dialogue carries over also, since "Another Stakeout" featured an homage to Dreyfuss' line from this film, complaining about a woman's underwear hanging in his personal space - "And I don't like the panties hanging on the rod!" (The first "Stakeout" film, by the way, repeated a line of his dialogue from "Jaws".)
AFTER: Once again, this year I see that my films are all about the real estate - hotel rooms and/or apartments. Neil Simon plays come from that time period where things tended to be set largely in one room (a Brooklyn home, a Manhattan apartment, a Biloxi barracks) - there's no shame in this, it goes back to Tennessee Williams and Ibsen and probably Shakespeare himself. If you can come up with a setting that hasn't been done before, and contains within it the conflicts needed to support your story, you're halfway home. Shakespeare probably came up with "Romeo and Juliet" just by thinking about their families' two houses in Verona, and it's not too far from there to draw a line to Oscar and Felix sharing an apartment in "The Odd Couple". Right?
OK, maybe that's a stretch, because there were probably a lot of steps in-between. But "The Odd Couple" was rumored to be inspired by Mel Brooks, and/or Neil Simon's brother Danny, who had both gone through divorces and moved in with single male friends. In much the same way, Simon's "Barefoot in the Park" was based on the first few weeks of Neil Simon's first marriage, and his later film "Chapter Two" was based on his second marriage, to Marsha Mason. One might easily presume that "The Goodbye Girl" has a plot that could mirror Simon's life experience between those other two, but that would be incorrect. Instead, this is allegedly based on Dustin Hoffman's life after moving to New York to become an actor, and starting to become famous.
This Neil Simon stuff seems like it comes from a writer who's been around, had a few relationships and thinks that he's hit upon some formula - it's not just taking your own life or your friend's lives and putting them up on the stage, it's got to fit into two or three acts, so that means there's got to be a story arc, and that means math is involved, and that (theoretically) nearly every relationship follows the same pattern. First you're friends, then lovers, then roommates, then spouses - and if you're lucky, you'll stay all of those things for a long time, but when the relationship starts to deterioriate, you'll end up as some incomplete combination of the above - maybe you're still roommates, but not lovers. Maybe you'll be friends, but no longer spouses, or vice versa.
Really, doesn't every relationship follow a similar pattern throughout the coupling and possibly uncoupling process? But writers are always looking for some way to shake it up, so here with "Goodbye Girl", we get people who are thrown together as roommates, without becoming friends or lovers first. That makes it unusual at first, or at least uncommon, and then we wait to see if the people in question are going to become more than just roommates. In this case, a woman's actor ex-boyfriend held the lease on the apartment, and when he moved out, he also subletted the apartment to another actor, without telling his live-in girlfriend. Yeah, that's a dickish move. He should have at least had the courtesy to sublet to her - the person being left should always get first dibs on the real estate.
However, that being said, it's a little strange that when the actor shows up to move in, our heroine negotiates a deal to share the space. This means that a man she doesn't know at all will be living closely to her young daughter, and the danger inherent in this is never even considered. This guy has no references, shows no I.D., how does she know he's even who he says he is, and not a random serial killer or pedophile? Wait, he's another actor, which to her is almost worse.
Outside of the relationship stuff, Dreyfuss plays an actor who's cast in a production of "Richard III", but the director wants him to play the deformed king as a very effeminate gay man, outwardly portraying the subtext that people may have read into Shakespeare's hunchbacked king over the years. There supposedly was a production like this at the Public Theater in 1974, which was a disaster. But its appearance here highlights the relationship between a director and his actor, which doesn't seem to be all that different from the one between Idi Amin and his doctor - so a director is kind of like a dictator - only instead of killing you, he can kill your career, which is also almost worse.
It's another literary cheat to have a child character who acts "wise beyond her years" - which essentially means that she talks like an adult, just a very small one. Because why should a writer take the time to learn how a young girl really talks, just for the sake of being accurate? To me, this comes off as lazy, because kids simply do not talk like small adults, they have their own way of looking at the world. I know this was a trend in the 1970's, where films like "Paper Moon" and "The Bad News Bears" tried to wring comedy out of children who act grown-up, but that's no excuse. What it really means to me is that some writer didn't know how to write dialogue for kids.
Also starring Marsha Mason, Quinn Cummings, Paul Benedict (last seen in "Jeremiah Johnson"), Barbara Rhoades, with cameos from Powers Boothe, Paul Willson, Nicol Williamson (last seen in "Return to Oz").
RATING: 4 out of 10 Japanese businessmen
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