Robert Mulligan’s Kiss Me Goodbye is a strangely slack and disinterested film, one of those works in which no one and nothing seems to connect with anyone or anything else. Three years after the death of her choreographer husband Jolly (James Caan), Kay (Sally Field) returns to the house they shared together, intending now to occupy it with her fiancĂ©e Rupert (Jeff Bridges). She soon encounters Jolly’s ghost, visible and audible only to her, and adjusts to his presence with remarkable ease; Rupert of course thinks she’s nuts, but sort of plays along, to the extent of taking the ghost on a road trip and ordering for him in a restaurant. The concept of the ghost is thin indeed – Jolly is clearly tuned into some greater force in that he’s able to dredge up undisclosed facts about Rupert’s past, but nothing more is made of that power, and Kay doesn’t evidence a shred of curiosity in how he experiences their interactions, or in where he goes when he’s absent, or in much of anything (none of the actors are anywhere near their best). For a while she toys with the idea of maintaining two husbands, opening up some raunchily twisted possibility, but a scene where she tries to make love to Rupert while Jolly’s in the room plays as unsexily as anything you’ll ever see. The movie limps along through some slumbering set-ups (an attempted exorcism; a wrong notion that Jolly’s spirit may have gone to hide inside Kay's dog) and then ends in as offhanded a way as it started, with the vaguest of explanations for Jolly’s intervention. The movie is of almost no specific interest, but stands as one of many examples of a recurring Hollywod mystery, of how so many presumably somewhat discerning and skillful individuals can devote their energies to such a coldly meaningless, complacent undertaking.
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