Looking For Mr. Goodbar (1977) Leave it to writer-director Richard Brooks, the straight-arrow, uncompromising books-into-movies guy to to excoriate the 70's .....with 3 years of the Me Decade still to go.......
Take
that, you self-absorbed, sex-drenched yuppies! See what happens when you use your new found freedom to boff any stranger you bump into in a bar.......ha!
There's no mistaking the purpose of Brooks' adaptation of Judth Rossner's best selling novel.......it's a fire-and-brimstone sermon, delivered straight from the director's bully pulpit (a major studio release, that is).......populated with a horrorshow parade of neurotic sluts, borderline psychopaths, crippled, love-starved children and ego-fueled dickheads who think with their dicks.......
With such a crew in place, you know this can't end well......
......especially for Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) who leads a daringly reckless double life .....by day, a caring, committed teacher of deaf children and by night, a drunk and drugged bar hopoer looking for love.....or maybe the next one night stand of fireworks sex......
No Mr. Goodbars turn up here for Theresa (whom author Rossner based on a real person).......but plenty of assorted nuts.......including an eogtistical pseudo-intellectual adulterer (Alan Feinstein), a coked-to-the-gills, live wire street stud (Richard Gere, in his breakout role), a too-good-to-be-true boyfriend-in-waiting (William Atherton)..........and finally the joker in the deck, a bi-sexual hustler (Tom Berenger) with a wounded psyche and a violent short fuse.
The film bluntly traces back Theresa's fragmented, adult life to her literally tortured childhood.......in which she suffered both a polio-twisted spine and a monstrous, unloving father (a bravura role for Richard Kiley), whom she still lives with. Her dad an unfunny Archie Bunker, continues to rule her with dictatorial coldness, while he remains oblivious to the blatant dysfunction of Theresa's sister (the awesome Tuesday Weld giving it the full Tuesday), who's forever on the prowl for a new boytoy and a reliable abortionist.
And so it goes on and on, this disco-fueled inferno, dominated in its middle section by Gere's look-at-me-look-at-me one man circus, highlighted by his frenzied kung-fu dance with his favorite toy......a glow-in-the-dark switchblade.........(makes him look like a grungy 1977 New York City Jedi warrior....)
In an unusual move for Richard Brooks, never known as a flashy visual stylist,, he clumsily inserts himself into the film with abrupt, awkward and poorly staged depictions of Theresa'a worst fantasies, some sexual, some paranoid. These supposedly clever touches just come off as dopey, crude and way beyond this director's skill set..........
The cast is game, though and Keaton, in case we forgot to mention, goes all in with this character's unhinged, uninhibited, anything-goes lifestyle.......a heroic piece of acting for sure.
Of all the "life sucks and then you die" dramas that ruled the 1970's, this one ends with the most blunt force of them all.......in an appropriate strobe-light bloodbath. As the last strobe blinks out, you can also thinks of it as the switch-off for grim, studio-financed dramas like this one........'Star Wars' had opened a few months earlier, ushering in the era of the feel-good blockbuster......
The only 'goodbars' moviegoers wanted from now on were at the snack bar......
But the film's still buoyed, after all these years, by Keaton and the rest of the equally powerful cast. For them alone, we're looking for 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2) for "Looking For Mr. Goodbar"
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