Goodbye, Lover

Director Roland Joffé, the man responsible for Demi Moore in The Scarlet Letter, unleashes yet another unrepentant hussy for cinema's umpteenth look at the lives of the hopelessly ruthless. Patricia Arquette is no Barbara Stanwyck, but with her little dagger teeth, platinum pageboy, and petite va-va-voom, she's the embodiment of self-absorbed depravity in this noir-tinged tale of double-crossers and double indemnity. Obvious, however, she's not: a devotee of motivational tapes and, yes, The Sound of Music, Arquette's Sandra is as quick to polish the church silver as she is to polish off anyone in her way.

She's the sexy center of a twisty, ultimately exhausting caper that convenes Dermot Mulroney as her drunkard husband, Don Johnson as an organ-playing PR pro, Mary-Louise Parker as a high-strung junior exec, and Ellen DeGeneres, as a cynical, take-no-guff cop. It's familiar, Coen Brothers territory, yet the film packs enough sly dialogue, narrative surprises, and arty touches to hold its own. The world is a shitty place, it says, rife with hypocrisy, artifice, and self-realized amorality. Still, any world that scores a murder scene to Julie Andrews's "So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye" can't be all that bad. At the Showcase cinemas (Route 6, Seekonk, and Warwick).
-- Alicia Potter