Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) Review

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 is also difficult to write about honestly, because the film’s argument and the film’s ending are not the same thing, and the ending is what everybody remembers.

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 does not discuss with anybody.

What Keaton finds is the competence. The teaching sequences are the best material in the film and they are played completely straight, with a woman who is patient, inventive and clearly excellent with children who cannot hear her.

There is a sequence where a deaf child signs something back to her correctly for the first time and Keaton plays the reaction as professional satisfaction and not as sentiment. The film understands that a good teacher’s pleasure in that moment is technical.

The film is careful to establish that this is not a double life in the sense of a secret shame. Theresa is not ashamed, does not 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 is present, it is 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 is 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, which is the correct outcome and slightly unfortunate, because this is the harder performance and the one nobody talks about.

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 has 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 the nomination is deserved. 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 specific way that has 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, which means the audience can place a scene before anybody speaks.

Richard Gere’s Tony is the best of the men and the character is written precisely. He is 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 is nothing of the composure he built a career on afterward.

William Atherton’s Martin is the other direction, a social worker who is decent, dull and offers a conventional life, and the film does not present accepting him as the correct answer either.

The film is also careful that Martin is not a fool. He is decent, is genuinely interested in her, and has a job that helps people, and the picture’s refusal to make him ridiculous is what keeps the choice a real one.

What the picture is genuinely good at is establishing that Theresa is not looking for a husband and is not looking for damage. She is looking for something the film never names, which is 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 is playing a man in acute distress about his own life, and the film gives him enough that the ending is not arbitrary and not enough that it is explained.

The Ending

Theresa takes a man home on New Year’s Eve and is murdered, and the film ends on a strobing sequence that is genuinely upsetting to watch.

The event is drawn from the Roseann Quinn case, which is 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 is not in question.

The problem is structural. The picture has spent ninety minutes establishing that Theresa’s choices are hers and are not pathological, and then delivers an outcome that a great many viewers read as consequence, because that is how endings work.

The film does not intend that reading and cannot 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.

What It Cannot Control

The reception in 1977 confirmed the problem. A considerable amount of the response treated the film as a cautionary tale, which is not 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 does not contain.

The available fix is a matter of placement instead of content. The same death occurring at the midpoint, with an hour afterward about the people who knew her, is a different film making the same point about the same case.

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, which is why the book carries it and the film does not.

The other difference is access. A novel can put the reader inside a decision and a film has to show it from outside, which means the same action reads as chosen in one form and as observed in the other.

Should you watch Looking for Mr. Goodbar?

Yes, for the first ninety minutes and for Keaton. A woman who is genuinely excellent at her job and has made a set of decisions the film treats as hers, a sister doing everything correctly and faring worse, and an ending whose shape delivers a verdict the screenplay never wrote.

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