Plot
Paula McFadden (Marsha Mason) learns she has been dumped by her married boyfriend Tony DeForrest and that he has sublet the Manhattan apartment she lives in with her ten-year-old daughter Lucy (Quinn Cummings). Elliot Garfield (Richard Dreyfuss), a neurotic but sweet aspiring actor from Chicago, shows up shortly thereafter in the middle of the night, expecting to live there, as he now rents the apartment. Though Paula is demanding, and makes clear from the start that she doesn't like Elliot, he allows her and Lucy to stay.
Paula struggles to get back into shape to try to resume her career as a dancer. Meanwhile, Elliot has his own problems. He has landed the title role in an off-off-Broadway production of Richard III, but the director, Mark (Paul Benedict), wants him to play the character as an exaggerated stereotype of a homosexual, in Mark's words, "the queen who wanted to be king." Reluctantly, Elliot agrees to play the role, despite full knowledge that it may mean the end of his career as an actor. Many theater critics from television stations and newspapers in New York City attend opening night, and they all savage the production, especially Elliot's performance. The play quickly closes, much to his relief.
Despite their frequent clashes, Paula and Elliot fall in love and sleep together. Lucy, however, begins to dislike Elliot, seeing the affair as a repeat of what happened with Tony, who had also slept with Paula, but then left her. Soon after, Elliot is offered a fantastic opportunity for a role in a movie that he cannot turn down. The only catch is that the job is in Seattle and Elliot will be gone for four weeks. Paula is informed of this and is scared that Elliot is leaving her, never to return, like all the other men in her life. Desperate to make her believe him that he will return, at the last minute, Elliot invites Paula to go with him while he is filming the picture and suggests Lucy stay with a friend until they return. Paula declines, but is happy because she knows Elliot's invitation is evidence that he loves her and will come back. As he leaves for the trip, Paula realizes that he left his prized guitar behind purposely, signaling that he indeed will return, and that he really does love her.
Read more about this topic: The Goodbye Girl
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)