Johnny Depp’s ‘Richard Says Goodbye’ Is Dead On Arrival [Zurich Review]

Whoever it was who waggishly coined the inversion “forgotten but not gone” in reference to an overlong adieu might well have been talking about the extended leave-taking that forms the basis of Wayne Roberts‘ “Richard Says Goodbye.” This is a [checks notes] 2018 film that feels like it was made in the early ’90s and then forgotten about for two and a half decades before having a polite, desultory and very brief fuss made of it prior to disappearing for good, like a guest who falls asleep at a party and isn’t discovered till the next day when you feel obliged to sit through an awkward, hungover breakfast with them. We’ll call this mortality play a tragicomedy because it’s not funny or tragic enough to earn either term singularly, but really, despite a tone that oscillates between quirkish and mawkish, it’s yet another warmed-over male midlife crisis movie, given supposedly higher stakes because the middle of life will be as far as this male will get.

Set in one of the cloistered, leafy New England colleges in which a disproportionate amount of U.S. cinematic 3rd-level education occurs, (Tim Orr‘s cinematography can’t find many new angles on it either) it opens as tenured English professor Richard (a bizarrely dandified Johnny Depp) gets a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Eschewing treatment, Richard stumbles about saying “Fuck” for a bit before coming to the decision to live every one of his last days as if it were his last day, which means throwing conventional morality and moral conventions to the wind, dammit!

This proves surprisingly easy to do without hurting anyone who doesn’t deserve it, as it turns out Richard’s doted-on daughter (Odessa Young) is absorbed in her own recently revealed lesbianism and his spitefully Type-A wife Veronica (Rosemarie DeWitt, who deserves so much better than this shrewish role) is already having an affair (both the lesbianism and the adultery are revealed at the very same dinner at which Richard had planned to share his bad news, in one of those unlikely screenwriting flourishes that somehow mean he doesn’t end up telling them at all). And Veronica’s affair, as she proudly announces, is with Richard’s boss, the dean of the college (Ron Livingston), so, as cuckold, Richard doesn’t even have to feel bad about turning grossly unprofessional. He dismisses three-quarters of his class for various reasons including “wearing sweatpants” and makes the remainder collaborate in his self-involved, alcohol-fuelled binge against the dying of the light.

During these “classes,” in bars and on sunny lawns, Richard is so busy delivering pithy life lessons that are meant to sound transgressive but are actually just sad and a little bit sexist, that he rarely gets around to mentioning any actual English literature. He does chasten the uppity feminist student by getting her to read “Moby Dick,” and forcing her to admit that one of the great classics of world literature is good, despite not having any women in it (Richard has declared himself uninterested in books dealing with “the plight of unkempt women”).

But aside from attracting the ire of the influential “feminists against Melville” lobby, ‘Richard Says Goodbye” is, for a film about a dying man not G-ing AF anymore, almost contortedly determined not to give actual offense.  Roberts’ script constantly teases some transgression but then coyly works in an aside or some deus ex machina mechanism to neuter the situation of any true provocation. Richard cheats, but he has more or less explicit permission from Veronica to do so and when he does, leaving his students gaping at the bar while he has sex with the pliant waitress in the toilet, one of them reminds the others (and us) that it’s ok because “They’re consenting adults!” Later, at just the point he’s getting a little too frisky with Zoey Deutch‘s dewy redhead for comfort (in so many ways this film recalls Woody Allen‘s in-fairness-way-more-horrible “Irrational Man“) Richard conveniently collapses and that icky storyline is abandoned. And yet another potentially risqué scenario is played for befuddled, pot-induced laughs — of course it is, because it’s about gay sex which no one could possibly take seriously.

All these hijinks are further defanged by Depp choosing to play Richard as yet another of his raffish naifs. It is one of his least grating recent performances (there are no weird contact lenses or false teeth, and his hair is fabulous), but the character is very much less than real — it is certainly impossible to imagine the pre-diagnosis version of Richard as a fusty, bookish academic trapped in a loveless marriage. Instead, like an alien who landed yesterday, Depp’s Manic Pixie Dying Guy is composed of his trademark mixture of swagger and innocence, like a whiskey-sozzled newborn baby, receptive to whatever the world throws at him, but blameless of consequence and quite, quite harmless.

That, of course, is important in the context of this being Depp, who storied personal life (his court case over abuse allegations is pending) hangs over the whole endeavor, almost more noticeably due to the film’s tortuous avoidance of the controversial. Sure, if there were more active toxicity in Richard’s behavior (the meanest thing he does really is to say some harsh stuff at a cancer support group to which he’s dragged by his friend played by Danny Huston) that would also be cause for complaint — probably more vituperative complaint at that. But when you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, really the question becomes: why bother at all? Why bother with this particular story if you can’t go far enough to say anything more insightful than “Carpe Diem, But Don’t Carpe It Too Hard”? After of 90 anodyne minutes of competent but uninspired filmmaking, Richard finally does say goodbye, and it’s hard to suppress an internal response of  “what, you’re still here?” [C]