By Tom Tugend | New Jersey
Standard
The characters are updated and slightly older, Neil Simon said in a call
from New York, but otherwise a new TV version of his The Goodbye Girl
retains the easy charm and predictable plot of the 1977 hit film, and
later Broadway play.
Basically, it's boy meets cute girl, girl hates boy and vice versa, boy
and girl fall in love, boy and girl live happily, at least as long as it
lasts.
Simon originally wrote The Goodbye Girl as a screenplay starring Richard
Dreyfuss, who won an Oscar, and Marsha Mason (then Simon's wife), who
got an Oscar nomination.
The principals, then and now, are Paula McFadden, a 30-something New
York dancer and divorcee whose actor boy-friend has just dumped her and
left town. Not only that, he surreptitiously subleased the apartment to
an actor friend, Elliot Garfield, who arrives one dark and stormy night
to the horror of Paula and her precocious daughter Lucy.
With living space hard to come by in the Big Apple, Paula and Elliot
reach a reluctant and hostile modus vivendi by sharing the flat. When
both suffer professional rejections, they console each other, with
sympathy evolving into friendship and love.
When Elliot then accepts a coveted movie assignment out West, it looks
like another farewell for the goodbye girl, but Simon deftly assures a
happy ending.
Aside from introducing a few contemporary gadgets such as cell phones,
the script is pretty much the same as the original.
"Our characters are a bit older, they talk faster, and the romance is
more adult," noted director Richard Benjamin.
But is the Elliot Garfield character Jewish?
Simon was noncommittal, but Benjamin guessed that "he seems to have a
Jewish gene somewhere."
The romantic leads, played by Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond)
and Jeff Daniels (The Hours) make the chemistry work, and they are
winningly complemented by Hallie Kate Eisenberg as daughter Lucy.
However, comedy honors go to Alan Cumming as a fey off-Broadway director
who tortures Elliot into portraying Richard III as a flamboyant
homosexual.
