MOVIE REVIEWS : CONEY ISLAND REALITY BACKFIRES IN ‘GOODBYE’

In bringing to the screen his unabashedly sentimental, nostalgia-drenched 1968 play “The Goodbye People” (at the Beverly Center Cineplex) Herb Gardner has succeeded only in embalming it.

Unfortunately, despite a splendid cast, the decayed, desolate stretch of Coney Island that serves as its sole backdrop is so palpably real that it merely makes everything that happens in front of it seem all the more artificial and stage-bound. Worse yet, such gritty realism makes its people, in their dreaminess, seem foolish rather than brave and gallant. If this play were to be filmed at all it might have been better not to pretend that it’s anything but a theater piece and to leave most of the locale to the audience’s imagination.

Martin Balsam plays an elderly Jewish immigrant whose recent acquisition of a Dacron ventricle has so overpowered him with feelings of mortality that, in his desire to live, he’s become obsessed with reopening his Coney Island hot-dog stand, called “Max’s Hawaiian Ecstasies,” derelict for 23 years.

While Balsam has come to inspect his old place and commence a long string of fruitless business calls, Judd Hirsch awakens from a night on the beach. A sculptor who’s spent his life designing molds to turn out pixies and elves, Hirsch has at last decided to drop out. That same chilly February morning, Balsam’s daughter Pamela Reed, a struggling actress who’s just changed her nose and her name, has picked her father’s old stand as the spot to tell her perplexed husband (Ron Silver) that she’s leaving him.

What Gardner, best and most fondly remembered for “A Thousand Clowns,” has on his mind is the need for people to dare to take chances and to reach out to each other. He also has a longing for the Coney Island he knew as a child in a more innocent time, a time when men like Balsam’s Max took pride in their small businesses, now so endangered by wrenching social and economic changes and by the proliferation of impersonal chain operations. (However, why any hot-dog chain would want to take over Max’s stand in such an abandoned area is indeed puzzling.)

What is so frustrating about watching “The Goodbye People” is that for all the thinness of its whimsy you can imagine its wonderful actors getting away with it on stage. You can believe that under a proscenium Balsam might just be able to catch you up in Max’s crazy dream, just as he does Hirsch. After decades of providing admirable support for others, Balsam at last has a fat starring role as the deluded Max--only to have circumstances prevent him from bringing this richly ethnic character to life.

Hirsch and Reed, one of the very best of our younger actresses, suffer similarly. Maybe because they’re not cast as dreamy types--and are on but briefly--Silver, Michael Tucker (as Max’s estranged lawyer son) and Gene Saks (as Max’s no-nonsense ex-partner) fare better. Tony Walton designed the restored “Max’s Hawaiian Ecstasies” in a spectacularly camp tropical ‘40s style, but the improbable delicacy of its construction calls attention to the same quality in the play itself.

There’s no doubt that Herb Gardner loves his people and cherishes his play, probably so much so that in both instances he’s too close to the material to have adapted it and directed on the screen himself. (You can only wonder what Elaine May, who directed one of its many productions on stage, might have done with it as a film.) But the harder Gardner tries to make us care for “The Goodbye People” (rated PG, although too talky for the very young) as much as he does, the harder it is to do so.