Diane in the Rough

By Frank Rich

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR. Directed and Written by Richard Brooks

Richard Brooks has made so many crude miscalculations in adapting Judith Ressner's bestselling novel to the screen that it is surprising that he mustered the wisdom to pick Diane Keaton as his star. In the role of Theresa Dunn, a Catholic schoolteacher who cruises singles bars at night, Keaton is everything the rest of this movie is not: provocative, affecting, scary. She creates a heroine who is at once sexual aggressor and victim, lady and tramp, and she relentlessly savages most pat notions about the nature of womanhood. It is a spectacularly daring performance whose meaning sadly eludes this film.

Writer-Director Brooks does not seem particularly interested in Keaton's Theresa, even though she appears in every scene. By switching the setting of Looking for Mr. Goodbar to a contemporary Any Town, U.S.A., Brooks has shifted the focus away from its protagonist. The book told the detailed saga of a troubled woman. The movie is a general diatribe against alleged American decadence: Brooks reduces the heroine's psychological background to a few broad strokes so that he can blithely blame her malaise on such irrelevant but cinematic phenomena as strip clubs, gay bars, TV game shows, strobe lights and fast dancing. Not since Paddy Chayefsky in Network has a middle-aged film maker so cantankerously lashed out against the young.

If Brooks wants to make a glib movie about modern mores, that is his right--but he should at least take the trouble to articulate his position with some care.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar has narrative lapses, jerky editing and confusing fantasy sequences that look like Ken Russell outtakes. Brooks' idea of style is to shoot Theresa in bright sunlight when she is being a good schoolteacher and in grim shadows when she is bedding down with her rough pickups. Though the movie was shot in color, the director's vision acknowledges only blacks and whites.

Brooks' perspective on the characters is equally simplistic. Not only does he come very close to making Theresa into a harlot, but he also transforms the men into brutish stereotypes. The heroine's father (Richard Kiley) and first lover (Alan Feinstein) are far less sympathetically drawn than they were in the novel. Theresa's one appealing suitor (William Atherton), whose sweetness should leaven the story, becomes as cruel as the rest. Only the Italian stud Tony, played with magnetic ferocity by Richard Gere, seems remotely human.

Indeed Tony's coital bouts with the heroine provide Looking for Mr. Goodbar with its few insightful scenes. When this couple make violent love, we can begin to understand the complex erotic passions that draw Theresa to her self-destructive double life. The rest of the film's brutality--its harsh language, its vicious climactic murder scene--are merely heavyhanded manifestations of Brooks' moral-mongering. The audience, not to mention Diane Keaton and Judith Rossner, deserve greater rewards in exchange for the punishment. -- Frank Rich

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