The Goodbye Playwright

THE LATEST PRODUCT of the Neil Simon factory clearly suggests the old master is losing his touch In I Ought to be in Pictures. Simon again teams with director Herbert Ross, who helped make The Goodbye Girl such a success in 1977. Unfortunately, the energy that propelled that film along has all but disappeared in their newest venture.

Simon has slipped into the most tempting and dangerous situation for a successful writer: sticking with his old and reliable topics. His career has been built upon an insightful and humorous look at the oddities of American families and relationships, and this has become a comfortable niche to wallow in After a while, however, it makes for a rather boring and insipid film experience.

The main character in I Ought to be in Pictures is once again the tough kid with a heart of gold--a more mature version of The Goodbye Girl's Quinn Cummings. Nineteen-year-old Libby Tucker (Dinah Manoff) decides to embark on an odyssey from Brooklyn to California, to find her screenwriter father who abandoned her 16 years earlier. She hopes to use his help to start--surprise, surprise--a career in show business. But Herb, her father, is not the successful writer she had expected and the road to riches is difficult. This opening sequence adequately conveys the disillusionment of a young woman who learns that her dreams aren't quite so easy to fulfill.

This sequence succeeds entirely through Manoff's performance Although the part demands surprisingly little of her Manoff manages to transcend the limitations of the cliche-ridden script and to portray Libby as a real person, not merely a mouthpiece for Neil Simon's jokes.

In fact, Simon's reliance on jokes is the major flaw of the film. The writer has become complacent about his characters, no longer treating them as human beings, but merely as devices. The irrelevant one-liners that he seems unable to control--"In Brooklyn, you learn Spanish first, then English, then Jewish"--dominate the film. Libby and her father Herb (Walter Matthau) spend most of their scenes together throwing witty remarks across the room; the audience comes to expect no more than impersonal humor. When a serious line does pop out of the dialogue here and there, rather than evoking any real emotion from the audience, it simply sits there, wallowing in sentimentality.

Although the film has a promising start, it quickly dissolves into vintage Simon schmaltz. If Simon had stuck to his original theme on the value of dreams and ambition, then he might have had a success on his hands. He chooses instead to deal with another important, but less interesting, subject: the rather hackneyed relationship between father and daughter. This story has been told many times before, and often in much more satisfying ways. Simon brings no originality to his approach of the subject.

ONE PLEASANT SURPRISE in I Ought to be in Pictures is the low-key performance of Ann-Margaret as Herb's girlfriend Stephanie Stephanie is the most sensible character in the film, and as such she delivers the most serious lines and she doesn't have to scream to get her point across. Simon uses her as a straight woman to the wise-cracking Herb and Libby, and Ann-Margaret makes the most of this position by never allowing herself to be upstaged. This is an unusual role for her, and she plays it with strength and credibility, thus surpassing the background spot the script assigns her.

Simon's screenplay restricts the direction as well as the actions. Even the set design is bland and tiresome: the first father-daughter confrontation is filmed in an annoyingly dull light. The audience's attention is directed away from the screen and toward the repetitious soundtrack. Director Ross ignores the fact that film is a visual medium--more so than the stage on which I Ought to be in Pictures was originally performed: he seems to put his own work on a secondary level to the screenwriter's. This is not a Herbert Ross film: the opening credits and the advertisements, in fact, refer to it as "Neil Simon's I Ought to be in Pictures."

At the beginning of the picture, Libby says that she's going to Hollywood to become an actress and improve "the crap they've been putting out lately." Unfortunately, I Ought to be in Pictures is hardly an improvement. One can't resist drawing comparisons between Simon and the character of Herb Tucker, who is also a screenwriter who hasn't written a successful work for a number of years. If Simon continues with the same overused storylines, ignoring realistic character development, then he may become just as stale as the character he has created. In the final analysis, there may be more irony in the film's title than intended: Neil Simon ought not to be in pictures anymore.