Goodbye Lover

The kind of nihilistic entertainment that offers a few giggles while you're watching, then leaves you feeling dirty for not loathing the whole thing, Goodbye Lover is a convoluted comic thriller centered around a real estate agent (Patricia Arquette) with dreams of living the good life and the alcoholic husband (Dermot Mulroney) in her way. Although the twisty-turny plot--shifted allegiances, stabbed backs (literal and figurative) and plenty of greedy grasping--eventually becomes strangely predictable in its unpredictability, there's something over-the-top goofy here that makes it possible to slip into the film's sociopathic world. Watching Arquette's wild blend of madonna and whore, or listening to Ellen DeGeneres' caustic punch lines as a world-weary detective, you realize that Goodbye Lover is not so much a thriller as an ultra-black-comedy, where part of the joke is on the viewer for abandoning moral outrage. Optional. (S. Renshaw)