Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) Review
7/10
A young woman with a limp from childhood surgery, a devout and violent father, and a sister who has made all the conventional choices. She takes a teaching job, gets her own apartment, and starts going out. The 7 is for a performance and a first two acts that are considerably better than the film’s reputation, attached to a conclusion that reads as punishment. Keaton made this the same year as Annie Hall and the two together are the best twelve months any actor had in the decade. It’s also difficult to write about, because the film’s argument and the film’s ending aren’t the same thing, and the ending is what everybody remembers.
Keaton’s performance is what I carry away from this film. For most of its length I found it smarter about a woman’s private life than I’d expect a 1977 studio picture to be, and I resent the last reel for how much of that goodwill it spends.
Keaton in the Same Year as Annie Hall
Theresa Dunn is careful, funny, self-contained, extremely good at her job, and conducting a second life that she doesn’t discuss with anybody.
What Keaton finds is the competence. The teaching sequences are the best material in the film and they’re played completely straight, with a woman who’s patient, inventive and clearly excellent with children who can’t hear her.
There’s a sequence where a deaf child signs something back to her correctly for the first time, and Keaton plays the reaction as quiet professional satisfaction. The film understands that a good teacher’s pleasure in that moment is technical. I think it’s the best moment she has in the film, and it lasts a few seconds.
The film is careful to establish that this isn’t a double life in the sense of a secret shame. Theresa isn’t ashamed, doesn’t agonize, and has made a set of decisions she considers hers, and the picture presents them as decisions and not as symptoms until the last reel.
The drug use is handled the same way. It’s present, it’s not escalating, nobody in the film delivers a warning about it, and the picture declines to organize her whole life around it in the way a film made twenty years later would certainly have done. Her apartment is the other piece of characterization the film gets right. She furnishes it herself, it’s hers, and the film repeatedly returns to her arriving home alone and being pleased about it. She won the Academy Award that year for the other film. That’s the correct outcome and slightly unfortunate, because this is the harder performance and the one nobody talks about.
Give your protagonist a job they’re good at and film it properly. Competence is the fastest way to make a reader respect somebody, and it costs you two scenes. The teaching material here is what makes the rest of the film a tragedy instead of a case study. Don’t write the second life as shame. A character who has decided something and isn’t agonizing about it is more interesting than one who is, and considerably rarer.
Establish the choice as a choice. The moment a reader reads behavior as a symptom, the character has stopped being a person.
The Family Is the Cause and the Film Knows It
Richard Kiley plays the father as a man of enormous conviction, physical violence and total certainty, and the performance is the most frightening thing in the film. The flashback structure is used sparingly and well. A childhood illness, a spinal operation, a scar, and a father who treated the whole episode as something that had been done to him.
Tuesday Weld plays the sister and the contrast is the film’s best structural idea. She’s done everything correctly, has a husband, has had surgery to look a particular way, takes pills, and is visibly worse off than Theresa at every point.
The two of them have one scene that carries the whole comparison. Katherine describes her marriage in entirely positive terms while visibly medicated, Theresa says nothing, and neither of them tells the other anything true.
Weld was nominated for it and she deserves the nomination. Katherine is doing an enormous amount of work to appear fine, and the performance is a woman who has never once in her life been asked what she wanted. That comparison is the argument. The film presents two responses to the same household, one conventional and one not, and for ninety minutes it declines to say which is working better.
The Bars
The nightlife sequences are shot in a way that’s aged into a document. Actual bars, actual period music, and a lighting approach that makes every room feel slightly too warm.
William A. Fraker shot it and the approach is consistent. The school is cool and even, the family house is dim, and the bars are amber and close. That means the audience can place a scene before anybody speaks.
Richard Gere’s Tony is the best of the men and the script gets him exactly right. He’s exciting, funny, athletic, entirely unstable, and the film understands that the first three are why the fourth is tolerated for as long as it is.
This was Gere before anybody knew him and the performance is almost unrecognizable as his. Tony is loud, physically restless, permanently in motion, and there’s nothing of the composure he built a career on afterward.
I like him better here than in almost anything he did later. He’s funny and frightening in the same breath, and the film goes a little flat whenever he leaves the screen.
William Atherton’s Martin is the other direction, a social worker who’s decent, dull and offers a conventional life, and the film doesn’t present accepting him as the correct answer either. It’s also careful that Martin isn’t a fool. He’s decent, is interested in her, and has a job that helps people, and the picture’s refusal to make him ridiculous keeps the choice a real one. What the picture is good at is establishing that Theresa isn’t looking for a husband and isn’t looking for damage. She’s looking for something the film never names. That’s the most honest thing in it. Tom Berenger arrives in the last fifteen minutes and the performance is the most difficult thing in the picture. He’s playing a man in acute distress about his own life, and the film gives him enough that the ending isn’t arbitrary and not enough that it’s explained.
Write the appealing dangerous character as appealing. If the reader can’t see why anybody tolerates him, you’ve written a warning instead of a person. Tony is funny and athletic and those are the reasons, and the film doesn’t editorialize about them.
Offer the safe alternative and make it dull instead of wrong. A choice between danger and virtue isn’t a choice, and a choice between danger and boredom is one people make daily.
Let the want stay unnamed. A character who can’t articulate what they’re looking for is more truthful than one with a stated goal, provided the behavior is consistent.
The Ending
Theresa takes a man home on New Year’s Eve and is murdered, and the film ends on a strobing sequence that’s upsetting to watch. The event is drawn from the Roseann Quinn case. That’s where the novel came from, and the film is entitled to it in the sense that the source exists.
Quinn was a teacher of deaf children in New York who was killed in 1973, and the details the novel and the film retain from the case are specific enough that the source isn’t in question. The problem is structural. The picture has spent ninety minutes establishing that Theresa’s choices are hers and aren’t pathological, and then delivers an outcome that a great many viewers read as consequence, because that’s how endings work.
That reading isn’t one the film intends, and it can’t prevent it. An ending is an argument whether the writer wants it to be, and placing a death at the end of a sequence of choices tells the audience the choices produced it. The film spends ninety minutes treating Theresa as a person with the right to her own decisions, and then loses me with a finale that plays like a sermon about what happens to women who make them.
What It Cannot Control
The reception in 1977 confirmed the problem. A considerable amount of the response treated the film as a cautionary tale. That isn’t what the screenplay is doing and is what the structure permits. That gap is the useful thing about it for anybody writing. The film’s position is sympathetic, its craft is good, and its shape delivers a moral the text doesn’t contain.
The available fix is a matter of placement instead of content. If I were cutting this picture, I’d put the same death at the midpoint and give the last hour to the people who knew her. That’s a different film making the same point about the same case, and it wouldn’t send the audience out believing Theresa earned what happened to her.
Judith Rossner’s novel is also worth knowing about here. It ends the same way and has four hundred pages to establish an interior life the film has ninety minutes for. That’s why the book pulls it off and the film doesn’t.
The other difference is access. A novel can put the reader inside a decision and a film has to show it from outside. That means the same action reads as chosen in one form and as observed in the other.
An ending is an argument regardless of your intention. Readers assign causality to sequence, and whatever comes last is read as the result of what came before. You can’t annotate your way out of it. A sympathetic portrait with a punitive shape is received as a punitive work. If the event must happen, consider moving it. Placement changes meaning more cheaply than any amount of rewriting.
Richard Brooks was sixty-five when he made this and had been directing since the forties. That shows in both directions. The technique is entirely assured, the coverage is efficient, and the film’s relationship to what its protagonist really wants is a full generation removed from her.
Length is a defense. A novel can establish enough interior life to survive an ending a film of the same events cannot. That’s a real structural difference between the forms and not a matter of skill.
Should you watch Looking for Mr. Goodbar?
Yes, for the first ninety minutes and for Keaton. The film gives me a woman who’s excellent at her job and has made decisions it treats as hers, and a sister doing everything correctly and faring worse.
That first stretch is good enough to deserve a higher number. The ending is what holds it at a 7, because its shape delivers a verdict the screenplay never wrote, and I can feel the picture turn on her in the last reel.
