Review: Goodbye, Lover

All good girls get what they want in the end. So Sandra (Patricia Arquette) may not fall under the usual definition of a good girl but in the money-hungry, murder-happy world of Roland Joffe's Goodbye, Lover, all good things come to those who work hardest. Anything else would be immoral.

Sandra's got a plan: she's got murder on her mind and she wants her lover Ben (Don Johnson) to make it a reality. Ben runs Iconage, a power PR and marketing firm that attempts to keep their clients' images clean even when they're off getting themselves mired in some sex scandal. His younger brother Jake (Dermot Mulroney) is the natural born dynamo but his alcoholic ways have given him a temperament to match his talent. Jake is Sandra's husband. And she wants him dead. And she wants Ben to make it happen.

"Lots of things can happen," she coos. "Maybe you should make them happen." But Ben's beginning to feel guilty -- maybe hot-to-trot Sandra isn't worth all the risk, maybe he shouldn't be betraying his baby brother, who appears to spiraling ever more out of control. Ben tries to shake Sandra free and take up with Peggy Blane (Mary-Louise Parker), a lovestruck coworker, but Sandra's not about to let him go without a fight.

To say any more would deprive you of the film's numerous twists and turns. Suffice it to say -- someone dies, but not who you think and everyone betrays everybody. The detectives sent to sort out the mess are Rita Pompano (Ellen DeGeneres) and Nathaniel Rollins (Ray McKinnon). Rollins believes there's good in everyone but Rita, ever the cynic, suspects foul play. Who has the motive? Who would kill for a possible jackpot of eight million dollars?

Admittedly, if one invests enough brainpower, one could find enough holes in the story to rock the film's foundation, but Goodbye, Lover is a fun, often deliciously clever watch. Part of it is attributable to several key people, one of which is Dante Spinotti, who trains his camera to afford the characters little or no privacy. Mirrors are everywhere and sliding glass doors dominate. A crucial phone conversation between Ben and Jake is complicated by Peggy's pesky figure hovering in the background (though a second viewing will reveal her action to be more deliberate than careless).

In Goodbye, Lover, the characters all live by the adage "Image is everything." They're all playing parts -- no one connects to the core. When we see Jake and Sandra having sex, it is Sandra's photograph that Joffe focuses on -- an image rather than the reality -- and Jake himself is only seen through the lens of a camera that Sandra is holding. It's interesting to note how the only character in the film who professes a desire to have something real is the first to be done away with.

Aiding and abetting the actors are Theadora Van Runkle's sleek, sexy, witty and whimsical costumes that recall the clothes she garbed Faye Dunaway with in The Thomas Crown Affair. John Ottman also mixes those qualities in his musical score. One of Sandra's idiosyncrasies, by the way, is her inexplicable obsession with the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. Though it doesn't equal the impact of having "Singin' in the Rain" accompanying a jolly gang rape a la Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, the gambit succeeds in revealing a perverse darkness to the songs' heretofore saccharine natures.

Mulroney puts in a good first impression but is overpowered by Arquette and Parker. Arquette brings a drowsy, childlike allure to her Martha Stewart-worshipping femme fatale while Parker, that eccentric whirlwind, infuses Peggy with her fizzy charm. DeGeneres is cuttingly funny while Vincent Gallo contributes an effective cameo. It is Don Johnson, however, who lends the film its substance. I'd forgotten how good he can be but then again he hasn't really done anything in the past couple of years to remind anyone. He's awfully good here, carefully demonstrating just how much caught he is between succumbing to his desire and betraying a brother.

Goodbye, Lover

Directed by: Roland Joffe

Written by: Ron Peer, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow

Starring: Patricia Arquette, Dermot Mulroney, Mary-Louise Parker, Don Johnson, Ellen DeGeneres, Ray McKinnon, Alex Rocco, Andre Gregory, John Neville