Word: theresa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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
...That Richard (In Cold Blood) Brooks-should decide to bring this trash-posing-as-fiction to the screen also shows at once a keen eye for the commercial and a readiness to pursue his art within the constraining framework of a depressing narrative. In taking on a character like Theresa Dunn as the focal point of his film, Brooks has confirmed an affinity for the dark underside of the individual initially suggested by his adaptation of Truman Capote's book on the massacre of a Kansas farm family. Such subject matter arouses doubts as to the director's artistic aspirations...