(may contain spoilers.)
Displaced rage flashes across Diane Keaton's visage in her `love' scenes in the film. In half-shadows, in detached ambivalence, Keaton/Theresa Dunn chooses to embrace her hunger, and engages the audience in her spiritual annihilation. This is not a film about promiscuity, or the singles bar scene, or the `decadent' Seventies; those elements are settings and props, a backdrop for the unfolding of a much more interesting, emotionally violent internal war.
Judith Rossner's based-on-real-events makes its way to the screen largely intact in Richard Brook's dark film noir-ish take, despite the excising of the internal-monologue approach of the book. It's a glib, apt approach; the material has elements in common with `women's films' of the Thirties and Forties---narratively it details a woman who chooses a socially `unacceptable' method of living, largely out of disenfranchisement from her family and society, and the inevitable spiral through a dimly-lit Purgatory.
In those films, female destiny was decided by severe social delineations, determined by whether or not the male characters forgave social/sexual/economic transgressions; in `Goodbar', the era's different, and superficially the milieu has changed. It's the post-sexual revolution (as Richard Brooks hoarily points out in unsubtle references to the women's movement). The character's still straitjacketed, by her oppressive family structure and internal demons, and there (deceptively) appears a way out physically and psychically; new apartment, new life, a `room of one's own'. Theresa Dunn's freedom and self-determination will not go unpunished.
The first half-hour's riveting, because we see a young woman's transformation from naïve, emotionally hungry romantic to tough cynic. Even more chilling is that it's not entirely an act of will; in the face of an abusive father and a first love who treats her like a sexual cesspool, detachment becomes a weapon of survival. Brook's script adds greatly to the psychosexual claustrophobia of these moments, as it adheres so strongly to Theresa's consciousness that the spectator views not just what she experiences, but also what she imagines, desires, dreads. This appropriation of Theresa's thoughts and fantasies, woven into the structure of her physical existence, draws and binds the audience to her journey into Hell but is also problematic and disingenuous on Brook's part---as the film delineates her descent, Brooks' script appears to validate the integrity of her dilemma, but also implicates female sexual self-determination in her downfall. That is, Richard Brooks implies that Theresa's sexual freedom, her insistence on subverting traditional modes of feminine sexual behavior (in the film's `love' scenes she is frequently filmed on top, or on the right side of the screen, an unusual power-position for female characters in this context) is as much or more to blame than the mental damage sustained from her messy, classically dysfunctional upbringing. This is thematically the film's greatest weakness, the filmmakers' moral indecisiveness which severely undercuts the narrative thrust and focus of the film---who are we to blame, Theresa's emotionally screwy, perpetually in-denial family
society for going down a moral spiral
or is Theresa both protagonist/antagonist in this schematic arrangement?
Problematic, but this ambivalence and ambiguous thematic structure also makes this film infinitely more interesting. The anxiety provoked by these elements in conflict produces an unexpected, morbidly enticing drama. Most of the credit for this film's power goes to Diane Keaton's presence. Her work is perfectly modulated, at times repulsively real and raw, and at other times devastatingly poignant in the ways she lies to herself and others about the implications of her character's actions. She glows with dark energy, gradually becoming one with the film's descent into what seems like a long, long communion with Night. Keaton nearly single-handedly prevents the film from transmogrifying into an anti-feminist diatribe, by imbuing Theresa with qualities which seem infinitely flawed and human. Amazingly she does this without descending into dramatic grandstanding or exploiting her character's weaknesses. Flawed but full of conviction (even if it's misguided), seething with misdirected anger, Diane Keaton is overwhelming in the film's silent sequences, alone in Theresa's dim, cavernous apartment, suffocating in her loneliness. Regardless of how the writer/director or her fictional family chooses to judge her, it's in the amalgamation of moments like these (alone, in bed with just her pillow to gratify herself, no words are needed to show the turmoil she's feeling) that Keaton subverts the moralistic scheme of the film and shows us something infinitely more wonderful---a persona in conflict with herself, unable to find an easy resolution within and without her dimly lit surroundings. What the audience takes away are fragments of Theresa's ruptured psyche that add up to a very beguiling human drama. Keaton won the Oscar for the wrong film in 1977.
In the end, Theresa Dunn finds the resolution to her journey. It's horrific. It's even more of a shock, because by that point, the confused, morally disjointed film has gathered into a coherent portrait of a soul in transition. She's struggled, and does she earn her fate? Seen as a moral judgement on her `lifestyle', the climax might be seen as a `punishment' justified by the character's behavior and lack of morals. In a sense, it's true that the film offers up Theresa as an example of when Good Girls go Wrong and what happens when you're not what's construed as a `good woman' despite the goodies and freedoms that society periodically offers up.
An alternate reading of the resolution: Theresa finds her Animus, her male side embodied in a sexually ambiguous stranger who represents the impossibility of psychic reconciliation with the fragments of her divided spirit. Theresa exploits and uses men as physical revenge for her childhood and the psychic wounds inflicted by her father and first love, but in doing so creates a psychosexual monster of injudicious power.
Theresa meets, and embraces, her shadow.
