The
Goodbye Girl
a
film by Herbert Ross released through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1977
Don’t forget about this movie. A true confection of comedy, The Goodbye Girl provided Richard
Dreyfuss his only Oscar and proves that Neil Simon really was, for a time, America’s
best playwright.
A New York single mom, when ditched by a selfish actor,
must acquiesce in the presence of a sub-lessee of said selfish actor. The mom is a burnt-out musical dancer, the
daughter a prodigious conversationalist, the sub-lessee a Chicago actor making
his Off-Off Broadway debut as Richard III...with a twist.
Neil Simon combines romance with his Odd Couple formula
of strange bedfellows. It’s a brilliant
idea because opposites do attract (or at least men and women who fight are
often attracted to each other).
Moreover, The Odd Couple wears
out its welcome through over-repetition, but here the romantic element takes
over just as we’ve had enough of their sparring. And since the setup is that the mom has been
ditched by two previous actors, she’s wary of this one and isn’t sure she can
be that trusting again.
In most love stories the tension is gone once the leads
have sex, but here there’s still no resolution because the movie was never
about whether they would get together, but whether they would stay together. This yields drama to the last drop.
The end is a brilliant compromise; they’re not together
but they are. The actor (Dreyfuss) will
return to the dancer (Marsha Mason) once he’s finished shooting a movie, and
the guitar that has been with him from the beginning of the story will stay
with the dancer as collateral and serve as a Dreyfuss stand-in.
From the Feminist perspective, it’s amusing to speculate
as to whether Paula would have slept with Elliot that night of the rooftop
interlude if he had not told her, during their dancing, that he got a “real
job.” Was it the prospect of security
that summoned her sex drive, or is it just a coincidence? After all, she does spend the rest of the
movie redecorating her apartment on Elliot’s improv troupe salary. And it fits her character, too—she’s been dumped
on so much that she cares about security and love (assuming they can be
disassociated) in equal parts.
And she’s thinking about her daughter, too. As realized by Quinn Cummings, the indefatigably
precocious Lucy is the movie’s secret weapon.
She provides wry commentary and she magnifies for the audience the pain
of Paula’s estrangement. Her best scene
is the carriage ride with Elliot. He
accepts the responsibility that the previous guys didn’t—he’s a surrogate
father to Lucy. She, like her mother,
loves him but is afraid to commit.
Lucy is a gem, but why the filmmakers would consider it
endearing or humorous to have Lucy spout sundry obscenities is a mystery. In the late ’70s cursing children must have
seemed radically chic. Now it’s just disconcertingly
counter-intuitive and common.
This is about as fun as movies can get and serves as a testament to Richard Dreyfuss’s wasted potential. Some romantic comedies have set-ups as good as this one, but very few are quite as funny.
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