Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
God, how I love Chinatown. It's one of those movies that sneaks up on you for the twentieth time; you think you know everything in it but then you start to watch it and you realize just how pale and lifeless your memory of it was compared to the real thing.
It's a great movie in many respects, Polanski's best (whatever you think of him as a human being, he's a very talented director), but its genius starts and ends with Nicholson. It's an absolutely flawless masterpiece for him; Cuckoo's Nest doesn't even come close. It's the performance even a great actor gets only once, maybe, in a lifetime. It's why I'll forgive him (like De Niro) for the 20-odd years of utter crap and second-rate shtick he's been turning in. He makes the character not larger than life, but more live than life, more real. Nicholson isn't even on the screen, we can almost forget that there is a person named Jack Nicholson, no matter how familiar we are with his face and voice.
And the part he absolutely nails, the part no one else got within a mile of, is the crucial element of the genuinely cynical, even sleazy man who somewhere inside is still decent in spite of himself. Bogie never quite convinces with the sleazy part: I can't really picture his Sam Spade screwing his partner's wife, and we all know M. Rick is going to do the right thing an hour before he does. Others, like Mitchum, never quite convinced on the decent bit: his character may have lived by a code, but the code was something he'd been taught, if only by experience. He's following the rules. Jake Gittes has a code, sure, and there are both hard lines and human values in it, but it's not something his reason imposes on his emotions like Spade's, not something he fully understands or really even knows is there. It's something that at least in part he tries very hard to pretend isn't there - he only cares because he likes likes breathing through his nose - yet he reacts violently to someone who calls his ethics into question. But then he honestly doesn't think twice - or even once - about taking pictures through people's bedroom windows. He gets that contradiction like no one else ever has.
That's why the ending isn't just tragic. It's soul-crushing. It's one of the blackest film endings I can think of. There's the audience's horror at what happens to Evelyn Mulwray (and what won't happen to Cross), and there's Jake's pain over those events, but there's more. When the credits roll, Jake is alive, but changed, ruined in a way Spade and Marlowe never were. Bogie's Spade is genuinely broken up at having to turn Brigid O’Shaughnessy over, but both his cynicism and his decentness survive intact - his view of the world hasn't changed; people are still liars and crooks and some ethical rules still have to be followed even if it's painful.
But Jake Gittes? We watch the best part of him die in those last few seconds. Not just watch, feel, because Nicholson is so real in the part. Gittes didn't have to send the girl over, he didn't follow his code over his feelings, or vice versa. He believed for just a moment, despite a lifetime of awful experience, despite having denied it for years, that maybe, just once, he could follow his heart and do the right thing - he could let that spark of decency out without getting taken for a ride. And it was pure decency, there was nothing at all in it for him: he wasn't going to get the girl in the end.
It took the whole movie for him to reach that point. It took years before the events of the movie to bring him exactly to that razor-sharp tipping point.
And then everything he's been trying to do, the people he was trying to help, the justice he wanted to see done, is destroyed in a moment, and we know that he will never, ever, ever make the mistake of listening to his humanity again.
And that’s why I love Chinatown.
It's a great movie in many respects, Polanski's best (whatever you think of him as a human being, he's a very talented director), but its genius starts and ends with Nicholson. It's an absolutely flawless masterpiece for him; Cuckoo's Nest doesn't even come close. It's the performance even a great actor gets only once, maybe, in a lifetime. It's why I'll forgive him (like De Niro) for the 20-odd years of utter crap and second-rate shtick he's been turning in. He makes the character not larger than life, but more live than life, more real. Nicholson isn't even on the screen, we can almost forget that there is a person named Jack Nicholson, no matter how familiar we are with his face and voice.
And the part he absolutely nails, the part no one else got within a mile of, is the crucial element of the genuinely cynical, even sleazy man who somewhere inside is still decent in spite of himself. Bogie never quite convinces with the sleazy part: I can't really picture his Sam Spade screwing his partner's wife, and we all know M. Rick is going to do the right thing an hour before he does. Others, like Mitchum, never quite convinced on the decent bit: his character may have lived by a code, but the code was something he'd been taught, if only by experience. He's following the rules. Jake Gittes has a code, sure, and there are both hard lines and human values in it, but it's not something his reason imposes on his emotions like Spade's, not something he fully understands or really even knows is there. It's something that at least in part he tries very hard to pretend isn't there - he only cares because he likes likes breathing through his nose - yet he reacts violently to someone who calls his ethics into question. But then he honestly doesn't think twice - or even once - about taking pictures through people's bedroom windows. He gets that contradiction like no one else ever has.
That's why the ending isn't just tragic. It's soul-crushing. It's one of the blackest film endings I can think of. There's the audience's horror at what happens to Evelyn Mulwray (and what won't happen to Cross), and there's Jake's pain over those events, but there's more. When the credits roll, Jake is alive, but changed, ruined in a way Spade and Marlowe never were. Bogie's Spade is genuinely broken up at having to turn Brigid O’Shaughnessy over, but both his cynicism and his decentness survive intact - his view of the world hasn't changed; people are still liars and crooks and some ethical rules still have to be followed even if it's painful.
But Jake Gittes? We watch the best part of him die in those last few seconds. Not just watch, feel, because Nicholson is so real in the part. Gittes didn't have to send the girl over, he didn't follow his code over his feelings, or vice versa. He believed for just a moment, despite a lifetime of awful experience, despite having denied it for years, that maybe, just once, he could follow his heart and do the right thing - he could let that spark of decency out without getting taken for a ride. And it was pure decency, there was nothing at all in it for him: he wasn't going to get the girl in the end.
It took the whole movie for him to reach that point. It took years before the events of the movie to bring him exactly to that razor-sharp tipping point.
And then everything he's been trying to do, the people he was trying to help, the justice he wanted to see done, is destroyed in a moment, and we know that he will never, ever, ever make the mistake of listening to his humanity again.
And that’s why I love Chinatown.