This ‘Girl’ has nowhere to go

Ah, the ‘70s. Remember? When an impecunious off-Broadway actor could support a bipolar former dancer and her 10-year-old daughter in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side?

At least, he could in Neil Simon’s 1977 film “The Goodbye Girl,” which starred Marsha Mason (then Simon’s wife), Richard Dreyfuss and Quinn Cummings as a pair of reluctant roommates and the sophisticated tot who suffers patiently through their hysterical conversion from hatred to love.

In the original, Mason played Paula McFadden, 33-year-old divorced mother of 10-year-old Lucy. Paula comes home from a shopping spree one day to find that her actor-boyfriend, the unseen Tony, has run off to Italy to appear in a Bertolucci movie just days before they were supposed to move to California. Tony has also sublet their apartment to an out-of-town friend, a struggling actor named Elliot Garfield.

Shafted, Paula and Elliot decide to share the place, a decision that, naturally, leads to a series of comical contretemps resulting in love. Once love has been declared and Elliot has landed a part in a movie, Paula, a low-budget, co-dependant, proto-Martha Stewart fan for whom cohabitation is a cue to “give it all up” (at least twice), directs her energies back into decorating and full-time elation.

Normally, it’s pointless to hold a period piece up to the light of current social mores, but the remake of “Goodbye Girl” asks for it. The new version, which stars Patricia Heaton, Jeff Daniels and Hallie Kate Eisenberg and airs tonight on TNT, takes all that is implausible and annoying about the original and pumps it full of hormones, qua a factory-raised Holstein

There are a few cursory nods to the present day -- Bertolucci has been unaccountably replaced with Roberto Benigni; Elliot carries a cellphone, though he conveniently drops it down three flights of stairs so the pivotal phone booth-in-the-rain scene might still take place; and Paula’s age has been raised to 36, recalibrating the female desirability expiration date to adjust for inflation, or Patricia Heaton’s actual age, which is 46. Otherwise, the script is virtually identical to the original. Too bad.

At least the original “Goodbye Girl” reflected, presumably, how 1977 New York bohemia lived. The remake, which upgrades and super-sizes Paula and Elliot’s lifestyle to fit current romantic comedy standards, doesn’t reflect anything so much as the pandering wish-fulfillment of contemporary movies.

Everything gets a makeover. Paula No. 1’s dumpy apartment gives way to an Elle Decor spread, relocated from the Upper West Side to the even more cost-prohibitive West Village.

In the opening scene, Paula and Lucy return home having cleaned out not Alexander’s, the low-end, now defunct, department store, but Bloomingdale’s. Lucy’s room, an ordinary city-kid room in the original, has been re-imagined as an IKEA miracle.

This is not to quibble with the art department. It’s just that there’s something really unsettling about the way television and movies have been commandeered by lifestyle despots. Stripped of context, Paula and Elliot seem vague and unmoored, floating around like ghosts of arty New York past in a hip-ified Ethan Allen showroom.

It’s no wonder that, in the role of a neurotic former chorus-line dancer and penniless single mother, Heaton is quite convincing as a Republican soccer mom. Eisenberg, meanwhile, displays none of the sad, soulful early-onset maturity that made Cummings interesting to watch. Daniels has the most success at finding a contemporary counterpart for Dreyfuss’ wheat-germ-eating, incense-burning, nude-guitar playing, loose cannon Elliot. Where Dreyfuss played him as hippie on the outside, Jack Lemmon in a Billy Wilder movie on the inside; Daniels imagines Elliot as he might be if he’d been born a generation later; good-natured, a little oafish, not so mad.

Almost everything else about the film feels oddly anachronistic. Even Simon’s unaccountable use of “dumped on” for “dumped” remains.

The plot of the original movie hinged on the couple’s expectations of each other in the turbulent wake of the sexual revolution. Mason and Dreyfuss were good at letting some of the lingering, hidebound gender roles peak through their artsy grooviness. The comedy reflected the uneasy negotiations between men and women way back when it was still possible for a female lead to have terrible hair. With Paula cleaned and sassed up, and Elliott de-machoed, none of it makes much sense anymore.

*

‘The Goodbye Girl’

Where: TNT

When: 8-10 tonight; repeated at the same times Saturday and Sunday.

Rating: The network has rated the movie TV-PG (may not be suitable for young children).

Jeff Daniels...Elliot Garfield

Patricia Heaton...Paula McFadden

Hallie Kate Eisenberg...Lucy

Writer, Neil Simon, based on his original screenplay. Director, Richard Benjamin. Executive producers, Simon, Ron Ziskin and Dave Collins.