Too Small for Their Britches

A trio of new American films is conspicuous without being noteworthy. The three all have energy, drollness, and flashiness; what they lack is an original —or, at least believable—vision, textural and moral consistency, and that almost perennial American desideratum, adulthood. Even in such a basically frothy genre as farce, the Europeans can (or could) give us grown-ups behaving childishly. In American farce, we get children pretending to be adults.

Take Neil Simon’s latest contribution to the screen, The Goodbye Girl. Marsha Mason plays a not-so-young Broadway musical-comedy dancer who has lost out both with her ex-husband, the father of ten-year-old Lucy, and with the actor-lover who just walked out on her. We are to believe that in this day and age one marriage and one prolonged affair constitute a checkered sexual history—for a Broadway dancer, of all people!—and that these two failed relationships prove our heroine to be a “goodbye girl” who brings some kind of undermining pessimism to her involvements with men.

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John Simon

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A trio of new American films is conspicuous without being noteworthy. The three all have energy, drollness, and flashiness; what they lack is an original —or, at least believable—vision, textural and moral consistency, and that almost perennial American desideratum, adulthood. Even in such a basically frothy genre as farce, the Europeans can (or could) give us grown-ups behaving childishly. In American farce, we get children pretending to be adults.

Take Neil Simon’s latest contribution to the screen, The Goodbye Girl. Marsha Mason plays a not-so-young Broadway musical-comedy dancer who has lost out both with her ex-husband, the father of ten-year-old Lucy, and with the actor-lover who just walked out on her. We are to believe that in this day and age one marriage and one prolonged affair constitute a checkered sexual history—for a Broadway dancer, of all people!—and that these two failed relationships prove our heroine to be a “goodbye girl” who brings some kind of undermining pessimism to her involvements with men.