Word: keaton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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...
...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
...hard to see how two hours of viewing Diane Keaton as a nymphomaniac schoolteacher sets Looking for Mr. Goodbar apart from umpteen other films viewing women as prostitutes. In addition, if Diane's willingness to be photographed naked-"like a piece of meat"-falls under your writer's definition of modesty, what would he consider immodest? I guess her "la-de-dahs" cover a multitude of sins...
...Diane Keaton is playing the same unhealthy game that Marilyn Monroe played. Like Monroe, this "vulnerable" and "uncalculating" behavior is obviously an act-to everyone but Woody Allen and TIME. No one is doing Keaton a favor by falling...