Bye Bye Braverman

Directed by Sidney Lumet, Bye Bye Braverman follows four intellectuals, including George Segal’s Morroe and Jack Warden’s Barnet, as they embark on a quest to track down and attend the funeral of a recently-departed friend. It’s a workable premise that’s employed to mostly unwatchable and increasingly interminable effect by Lumet, as the filmmaker, armed with Herbert Sargent’s screenplay, delivers a sluggish drama that’s dominated by uniformly unlikable protagonists and unconvincing, hopelessly theatrical dialogue – with the combination of the two paving the way for a midsection almost completely devoid of compelling scenes and sequences. And although the performances are fine (albeit wildly over-the-top), Bye Bye Braverman‘s arms-length atmosphere is compounded by an ongoing emphasis on such seemingly endless interludes as the gang’s encounter with a black cab driver and, in an aggressively protracted sojourn, a lengthy sermon delivered by Alan King’s Rabbi. By the time the predictably anticlimactic finale rolls around, Bye Bye Braverman has undoubtedly cemented its place as a palpable and thoroughly objectionable misfire that surely stands as the nadir of Lumet’s robust body of work.

* out of ****