GOING TO THE MOVIES
Jonathan Baumbach
SHOW-OFFS
The Long Goodbye
Seeing movies, writing about them is a more subjective
business than the authoritative voice of most reviews admits. One
runs into a good deal of self-deception and cant among reviewers
who try to make the fleeting reality on the screen seem unequivo–
cal. There is so much fantasy invested in moviegoing that movie
reviews tend to tell us more about the reviewer than the reviewed.
This is prelude to saying that Robert Altman's odd version of
Raymond Chandler's
The Long Goodbye,
which has many inciden–
tal virtues, disappointed me and that my disappointment may have
as much to do with false expectations as with the weaknesses of
the film. The movie
I
witnessed didn't so much demythify the
private eye, as reviewers advertised, as offer him to us as some–
thing else altogether-- a version of the Elliott Gould persona, a
wisecracking, crude, and shy New York Jew displaced in a futuris–
tic California. Updating the Chandler novel to the seventies, Alt–
man's
The Long Goodbye
is an exercise in self-revealing style, a
showcase for the director's impressively eccentric cinematic man–
ner.
Gould's Philip Marlowe is one of those devious schlemiels
who fends off vindication by pretending to be less formidable than
he is (or secretly thinks he is). Although he seems ineffectual and
vulnerable for a man in his profession, Gould's shamus is cool
under pressure (as cool as any of his Marlowe predecessors) or,
depending on how you want to read him, oblivious to the world
outside him. The wisecrack helps him to keep his distance from
others and, more importantly, from his own feelings. Living alone
