Review: The Long Goodbye

Robert Altman may be better known for his classic films like MASH or Nashville, but that doesn’t mean his lesser known titles don’t pack an equally subversive punch.

The Long Goodbye is based off the 1953 novel by Raymond Chandler of the same name. It follows Philip Marlowe (played by Elliott Gould), a Private Eye who gets wrapped up in a murder investigation after agreeing to help a long time friend flee to the Mexican border.

Soon he is getting questioned by the police, hunted by the mob and hired by eccentric millionaires. As the bodies begin to pile up, Gould seems less inclined to trust those he thought were his friends, and as any good gumshoe would do, trust his guts over the words of a pretty lady.

But plot isn’t the strongest point of this film noir reduction, which operates better as a vehicle to criticize burnt-out 70’s Hollywood lifestyle while toying with the tropes of the genre it pays homage to.

The film begins with Marlough waking up in the middle of the night, and he looks straight out of the Bogart era. No velvet turtlenecks or bell-bottoms for this guy. Oh no, Altman’s Marlowe is a straight laced detective from a different era, and when he wakes up in that first scene, it seems that he has been asleep for decades.

To help push the well dressed straight-laced Marlowe out of his cultural timeline, he is juxtaposed next to a group of female hippies living next door to them. These free loving, yoga practicing, pot brownie baking hippies mesmerize all who pass by on their way to Marlowe’s apartment, but Marlowe couldn’t be less interested. All the commonplace temptations of the era he lives in hold no appeal to him. When one of these  lascivious ladies offer him a brownie, Marlowe simply replies “No thanks. They’ll rot my teeth.”

Marlowe is from another time. His character is a throwback to classic, quick witted detectives of the film noir hey day. Seeing as the film was scripted by Leigh Brackett, who helped bring The Big Sleep to the screen in 1946, it should be no surprise that The Long Goodbye would be well versed in the tools of the genre, which it so lovingly pokes fun at. For instance, the film’s tagline is “nothing says goodbye like a bullet,” showing Gould’s Marlowe pointing a pistol at some unidentified, out of frame target. Yet,  for about 98% of the film, Marlowe is an unarmed pacifist, using his wise-cracking tongue to deconstruct his adversaries and piece together the mystery. Marlowes confidence is exuded not through violence, but instead its repression.

The most obvious play on the film noir genre that any viewer can pick up is the constant repetition of the film’s theme, the song “The Long Goodbye.” Crammed into the film at nearly every conceivable moment, we hear the song play through the radio of a racing convertible, as “musak” in a supermarket while Marlowe shops for cat food, and even at a funeral in Mexico, played by a mariachi band.

Altman’’s loving homage to a genre so out of touch with the Hollywood generation he was surrounded by, The Long Goodbye almost seems to be forcing this decades-old genre into a more current time frame. Just like he mutates the musical theme to fit it into improbable scene after improbable scene, Altman’s Marlowe too is a mutation of the classic hard-boiled detective, and seems shoehorned into the film’s space and time. It is Marlowe’s outsider mentality that enable him to navigate the film’s  myriad of 1970’s Hollywood social hierarchies without subtle disinterest, and by not aligning Marlowe to any of the cultural norms of his time, Altman achieves a film that is truly in a time of its own.

(3/4)