Goodbye, Lover
(Directed by Roland Joffe; starring Patricia Arquette, Dermot Mulroney; 1999)
I’ve just transcribed no less than eleven pages of notes I scribbled during Goodbye, Lover, and my mind boggles. The plot is so labyrinthine that I’d completely forgotten the serial killer named The Doctor, who murders young women by injecting curare into their veins with a syringe. When a character like The Doctor is an insignificant supporting character, a movie’s plate is a little too full, don’t you think?
Goodbye, Lover is not so much a story as some kind of a board game, with too many pieces and not enough rules. The characters careen through the requirements of the plot, which has so many double-reverses that the real danger isn’t murder, it’s being disemboweled by G-forces. There’s no way to care about the characters, because their fates are arbitrary—determined not by character, not by personality, but by the jigsaw puzzle constructed by the screenwriters (there are three of them—which for this material represents a skeleton crew).
And yet the film does have a certain audacity. It contains a character played by Patricia Arquette who is the most enthusiastic sexual being since Emmanuelle, and another, played by Don Johnson, who just plain gets tuckered out by her demands. (At one point, they’ve taken the collection in church and are walking down the aisle with the offering, and she’s whispering that he should meet her for sex tomorrow, or else.) There’s also a droll supporting role for Ellen DeGeneres, as a police detective who keeps picking on her partner, a Mormon man who doesn’t, I hope, understand most of her jokes. One of her key clues comes with the discovery of a Sound of Music tape, which arouses her suspicions: “I don’t trust anybody over the age of ten who listens to The Sound of Music.”
The movie opens with phone sex and never looks back. We meet Sandra (Arquette), a Realtor who memorizes Tony Robbins self-help tapes, treasures The Sound of Music as her favorite movie, and likes to whisper, “I’m not wearing any underwear.” She is having an affair with Ben (Johnson), and at one point handcuffs him with some sex toys she finds in a house she’s selling. When the clients return unexpectedly, poor Ben barely has time to release himself and hide the cuffs in his pants pocket. (The Foley artists, concerned that we may have missed the point, cause the cuffs to rattle deafeningly, as if Ben had a tambourine concealed in his underwear.)
Sandra is married to Jake (Dermot Mulroney), who is Ben’s brother. Ben is the straight arrow who runs an ad agency, and Jake is the unkempt alcoholic who nevertheless is a brilliant copywriter. Why is Sandra cheating on Jake? The answer is not only more complicated than you might think—it’s not even the real answer. This is one of those plots where you might want to take a night school class about double-indemnity clauses in insurance policies before you even think about buying a ticket.
My space is limited, but I must also mention the GOP senator who is caught with a transvestite hustler; the struggle on the condo balcony; the motorcycle-car chase; the sex scene in a church’s organ loft; the black leather mask; the Vegas wedding chapel ploy; Mike, the professional killer (not to be confused with The Doctor); and Peggy, Ben’s secretary, who is played by Mary-Louise Parker as the kind of woman who would be a nymphomaniac in any other movie, but compared to Sandra is relatively abstentious.
There is a part of me that knows this movie is very, very bad. And another part of me that takes a guilty pleasure in it. Too bad I saw it at a critic’s screening, where professional courtesy requires a certain decorum. This is the kind of movie that might be materially improved by frequent hoots of derision. All bad movies have good twins, and the good version of Goodbye, Lover is The Hot Spot (1990), which also starred Don Johnson, along with Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connolly, in a thriller that was equally lurid but less hyperkinetic. Goodbye, Lover is so overwrought it reminds me of the limerick about that couple from Khartoum, who argued all night, about who had the right, to do what, and with which, and to whom.
The Guardian
(Directed by William Friedkin; starring Jenny Seagrove; 1990)
Of the many threats to modern man documented in horror films—the slashers, the haunters, the body snatchers—the most innocent would seem to be the Druids. What, after all, can a Druid really do to you, apart from dropping fast-food wrappers on the lawn while worshiping your trees?
That’s what I would have said, anyway, until I saw The Guardian, a movie about a baby-sitter whose goal is to capture babies and embed them in a vast and towering old sacred druidical tree, which she appaently carts around with her from state to state and aeon to aeon.
The Druid, who is probably immortal but takes the human form of a foxy British governess, is played by Jenny Seagrove. Even the people who hire her observe that she’s too pretty to be a governess. They are a Chicago couple (Dwier Brown and Carey Lowell) who move to Los Angeles after he gets a better job in the advertising business. A lot better: In Chicago they lived in a two-bedroom flat, but in L.A., despite the higher real estate prices, they’re able to rent a house by a famous architect (Brad Hall), who even drops in personally to repair the doors. The house is right on the edge of one of those vast deep green forests that we all know are such a feature of Los Angeles topography.
The nanny brings good references with her, and has one of those British accents that costs a lot to acquire and maintain. She also knows a lot about children. She knows, for example, that after thirty days the “baby-cells” in the bloodstream are replaced by grown-up cells. This seems to be particularly important to her.
Having established these facts, The Guardian then bolts headlong into the thickets of standard horror film clichés: Ominous music, curtains blowing in the wind, empty baby cribs, dire warnings from strange women, manifestations of savage canines, and the lot. The architect comes to a gruesome end, the husband suspects the nanny’s vile scheme, and about the only original touch in the movie is that, for the first time in horror film history, a chain saw is used against its intended target, a tree.
The Guardian was directed by William Friedkin, sometimes a great filmmaker (The Exorcist, The French Connection). His most recent previous film, based on a true crime case, was named Rampage and was not even properly released. I saw it and admired it. Now this. Maybe after years of banging his head against the system Friedkin decided with The Guardian to make a frankly commercial exploitation film. On the level of special effects and photography, The Guardian is indeed well made. But give us a break.
Gunmen
(Directed by Deran Sarafian; starring Christopher Lambert, Mario Van Peebles, Patrick Stewart; 1994)
The opening sequence of Gunmen begins with a shot of a sweaty, unshaven face with a fly crawling upon it. Not long after, a prisoner is astonished when the wall of his cell is blown away and he is beckoned to freedom by a man standing outside. Both of these visuals are recycled from famous spaghetti Westerns.
This is a bad omen. Most directors have at least one or two original ideas when they start a film, and they tend to put them right at the beginning, as audience grabbers. When Deran Sarafian borrows well known ideas from famous movies right at the get-go, it doesn’t bode well for what’s to follow. Nor should it.