Goodbye Lover

Patricia Arquette delivers another of her unlikely temptress turns as Sandra Dunmore, an over-sexed blonde with an insatiable appetitefor, among other things, The Sound of Music. Observing something's amiss, her husband Jake (Mulroney) is hitting the bottle big time, but he'd never guess she was screwing his own brother Ben (Johnson). Ben in turn wants out, so tries it on with his improbably prim colleague Peggy Blaine (Parker); the scorned Sandra is somewhat put out. Or is she? Naturally the plot's not what it seems, twice over. Like its characters, the film operates in extreme bad faith, unloading a stream of narrative deceptions and obfuscations in an attempt to maintain what semblance of suspense the hysterical melodrama, lumpen dialogue and farcical acting still allow.