Goodbye Lover - 1998 film review

I came to the neo-noir film Goodbye Lover by the most circuitous of routes. Wandering around Youtube, I stumbled across a wonderful, smoky piece of film music by John Barry. It was labelled as a demo from Barry's rejected score for the film Goodbye Lover. I was amazed. How could it have been rejected? The soundtrack actually used was written by someone called John Ottman. Who? No disrespect to him, but Barry won five Oscars. What on earth was going on?

It turns out that the film was made by Roland Joffe, a director of some distinction. He hired Barry, but they fell out, apparently because Joffe felt that Barry's music didn't quite capture the mood he was looking for. So I had to watch the film to figure out why. Having done so, the explanation has become clear. Barry thought he was writing music for a film a bit like Body Heat. Goodbye Lover is a crime film with plenty of twists. But it's primarily a black comedy. And in many ways it's a mess. 

The film flopped on release, with the critics hating it, but I must say that it does have a number of redeeming features and despite myself I rather enjoyed it. The cast is very good, with Patricia Arquette funny as a femme fatale who is obsessed with The Sound of Music, and a great double act in the detectives - one is a hard-bitten woman splendidly played by Ellen De Generes, the other a naive young man who sees the good in everyone, even really evil people. Some of the dialogue is genuinely witty. And some of the plot twists are entertaining.

The trouble is that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. There are enjoyable scenes, but Joffe fails to knit them together in a way that's artistically satisfying. As a result, we lurch from one crazy situation to another, and have no real empathy with any of the characters. It's a great shame, because there were some nice ideas in the script. That was probably what attracted John Barry to the project. Perhaps Joffe would have been well advised to create something closer to the mood of the music that Barry wrote.