In “As Good As It Gets,” Jack Nicholson plays an obsessive-compulsive creep of a New York City writer named Melvin Udall, a poison-tongued loner who writes pop romance novels and avoids the real stuff in his own life. (I know, I know. Fat chance in a romantic comedy.)
This is one of those guys who really ruins your day — every day. Melvin always eats breakfast at a half-trendy little cafe, and annoys the people eating and working there. Eventually, he has the bad taste to fall in love with a harried waitress who takes all his orders.
It sounds like a gushy, wise-cracking, heart-tugger of a movie: “It Could Happen to You” meets “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” But it doesn’t play out that way. Mostly, this comedy is dry as a bone and smart as a whip — largely because Nicholson plays Melvin with maximum concentration and total immersion. “You want a creep? OK, I’ll show you a creep,” he seems to be telling us and the film’s writer-director, James L. Brooks. “I’ll show you obsessive-compulsive. I’ll show you politically incorrect. Hold on to your hats, buckos.”
Good advice. The movie is basically about Nicholson’s Melvin and Helen Hunt’s waitress Carol Connelly improbably falling for each other, with Greg Kinnear as a gay neighbor along for the ride. But, at first, we can’t even be totally sure that Melvin has the hots for Carol — who is a single mother living in Brooklyn with her worried mom (Shirley Knight) and a chronically asthmatic child (Jesse James) — because Melvin is one of those ferociously fixated characters who needs to have everything exactly the same way every day of his life.
What a character Melvin is. He brings plastic cutlery to the cafe to avoid germs. He always takes his eggs and meat the same way. He never steps on cracks in the sidewalk — and if he sees a brick sidewalk with lots of cracks, he’s paralyzed. If Melvin doesn’t get his way, in any of the wacko things he does daily, he throws a temper tantrum and makes vicious insults. Actually, though, that’s not as serious as it sounds — because Melvin blowing his top isn’t too different from Melvin in a good mood. Either way, he’s making vicious insults, snarling obnoxious obscenities and, in general, behaving like a surly cur. It’s just that wyhen he’s angry, he’s a little louder.
The first time we see Melvin, he doesn’t look particularly mad or bad. But he still tosses a cute little dog down his apartment building’s trash chute and then insults the dog’s owner, the good-natured gay next-door neighbor, Simon, who is an Alice Neely-style portrait painter (played by Kinnear, with bleached hair). Then, for good measure, Melvin verbally slams Simon’s gay African-American buddy, art dealer Frank (Cuba Gooding Jr.). When Frank stands up to him, flashing some attitude, hard-guy Melvin cringes and whines.
If you’ve eaten many breakfasts in New York, you may have run into a Melvin or two — and you’ve probably wished someone would throw him down a trash chute. But movies and human empathy are amazing things. Spend time with a guy and you begin to like him, even if he’s an obnoxious jerk. The idea behind the movie is to create a character of weird, acidulous disposition and unpleasant eccentricities and then to progressively peel back layers of personality to reveal a (no kidding) subtler, sweeter, more vulnerable soul beneath.
What kind of hero is this? What kind of movie is it? Brooks, who directed “As Good As It Gets” from a script he wrote with Mark Andrus, doesn’t seem to know himself at times — though, again, that’s not quite the disadvantage it initially appears. John Cassavetes worked exactly that way with his actors, who were always encouraged to explore their characters and take off in unexpected directions. And that’s what Nicholson and Hunt — and, to a lesser extent, Kinnear and Gooding — do here. The performances are solid, but you can feel them about to sail off.
Brooks, who cut his writer’s teeth on some of the finest TV comedies (including “Taxi” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”), has always worked in a different way, constructing well-crafted bittersweet little comic fables that ruefully exposed and smiled at foibles and flaws. In most Brooks scripts, the characters are funny, precisely because we know what they’re going to do. But knowing everything in advance may get to be a drag, even if you’re the writer-director. Is there a touch of autobiography and self-revelation in the Melvin Udall character?
In both “Terms of Endearment” and “Broadcast News,” Brooks’ tone oscillated freely between sentiment and humor, hilarity and pain. But here, the mood is even more promiscuous. In “As Good As It Gets,” the characters’ flaws and problems are overwhelming. After Simon is robbed and bashed by the buddies of a young male model (Skeet Ulrich) and we learn that Carol is lonely and desperate, we feel some real anguish. As Hunt and Kinnear play them, Carol and Simon are on the ropes. Sweet, bright and talented, they only appear able to cope with New York life. Each is right on the edge of collapse or defeat. It’s crazy Melvin, the bad-mouthed reclusive beefer, who apparently has the city’s number.
This is a good movie — but you have to relax into it. And one of the nice things about “As Good As It Gets” is that you can’t really predict where it’s going. Oh, sure: You know it’s a romantic comedy. So you know somebody will get together at the end. And they do, sort of — but not in a way that’s totally reassuring. “As Good As It Gets” suggests that life is a set of compromises, and that compromise isn’t ultimately such a bad thing. After all, who wants to try to walk behind a line of people who won’t step on sidewalk cracks?
One thing movies tend to fudge or trivialize is the awful uncertainty of romance, the sense that at any moment, everything will unravel. There’s nothing much at stake in movies like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Pretty Woman.” But there’s a lot at stake here, and we can almost hear the cry: Life, give me a break. In “As Good As It Gets,” that almost sums up what we feel. Maybe this isn’t so bad. Maybe this is as good as it gets. If it is, why not enjoy it?
”AS GOOD AS IT GETS”
(star) (star) (star) 1/2
Directed and produced by James L. Brooks; written by Mark Andrus, Brooks; photographed by John Bailey; edited by Richard Marks; production designed by Bill Brzeski; music by Hans Zimmer. A TriStar Pictures release; opens Tuesday. Running time: 2:18. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Melvin Udall ………. Jack Nicholson
Carol Connelly ………… Helen Hunt
Simon Bishop ………… Greg Kinnear
Frank Sachs ……… Cuba Gooding Jr.
Vincent …………….. Skeet Ulrich
Beverly …………… Shirley Knight
