Country: United States
Genre: Comedy/Romance
Director: Herbert Ross
Year: 1977
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
The Goodbye Girl is very interesting, in a social anthropology kind of way.
It’s a comic romance between Paula McFadden (Marsha Mason) and Elliot Garfield (Richard Dreyfuss).
Paula has just been dumped by her actor boyfriend, who moved to Italy for a part in a movie by Bertolucci. The bastard sublet their apartment without telling her, so it’s a big surprise when Elliot shows up, ready to move in. So, at first, these two characters are antagonists, but they slowly warm towards each other.
The only problem with this scenario is that the Paula McFadden character is a pathetic, neurotic, borderline psychotic bitch. Let me give you an example. Paula is mugged by a trio of thugs while Elliot is buying a bottle of wine for a romantic dinner. Later, the two of them see the getaway car and Paula shames Elliot into chasing it down. Elliot comes within a hair of being a homicide statistic, but Paula whines that he didn’t retrieve her purse.
What is wrong with this picture?
Nothing, for most American viewers of The Goodbye Girl. When I first watched the movie when it came out, I thought nothing of Paula’s behavior. Americans are so conditioned to the awful behavior of American women that we actually think it’s normal. But this time, I saw The Goodbye Girl with my wife, who happens to be Indonesian. She kept going on and on about how horrible Paula was, and I had to agree.
The end result is that you’re scared for Elliot and you don’t give a rat’s ass about Paula. So what if she keeps getting dumped? The last guy she went out with, she felt safe, so she let her body go to hell. When Elliot gets a decent job, she can’t wait to start spending his money. Run away quick, Elliot!
But that’s just the sociology. Is The Goodbye Girl funny?
The movie starts out rather poorly, with a dialog sequence between Paula and her precocious daughter, Lucy (Quinn Cummings). The dialog is very stagy, which would be fine in live theater, but doesn’t really play that well on the big screen.
Fortunately, things pick up when Elliot comes onto the scene. Richard Dreyfuss invests writer Neil Simon’s dialog with enormous energy and an effortless naturalism, so even though there is a joke in practically every sentence, it just seems that Elliot is especially witty.
I enjoyed the romantic sparring between Elliot and Paula, but I still dreaded the inevitable happy ending, which is an odd circumstance in a romantic comedy.
If you have an American wife or girlfriend, she will no doubt enjoy the movie, but you may think twice about watching it with her. She just might expect you to be a saint, like Elliot.
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