As Good As It Gets

As Good As It Gets

There is something about Jack Nicholson that makes you smile. Maybe it is the expectation of seeing him get away with something. He knows all the angles. His screen personality was cemented forever when he told the waitress to hold the chicken salad between her knees in “Five Easy Pieces.”

“As Good as It Gets” takes this attitude as far in that direction as possible: He plays an obsessive-compulsive curmudgeon whose contact with the world consists mainly of insults not funny ones, but remarks designed to wound. It is some sort of sick tribute to Nicholson that he can deliver this dialogue in what is, after all, a comedy.

He throws racist, sexist, homophobic and physical insults at everyone he meets, and because it’s Nicholson we let him; we know there has to be a payback somewhere. If you see this movie, ask yourself how his tirades would sound coming from any other actor. They would bring things to a horrified stop.

Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, who hunches down in the apartment where he has churned out 62 romance novels for women (Asked how he writes the female characters so well, he says: “I think of a man. And I take away reason and accountability”). He hates everyone in the building and starts by throwing his neighbor’s little dog down the garbage chute; then he goes out to eat at a nearby restaurant and lays out his own plastic cutlery.

“Sometimes you have to use other people’s clean silverware,” advises Carol the waitress (Helen Hunt). She waits on him but she doesn’t like him, and when he makes a wisecrack about her asthmatic son she tells him either take it back or she will never ever serve him again since she’s the only one who will serve him and this is the only restaurant where he will eat, eventually he caves in (a little while later when he’s finally thrown out of the restaurant, there’s applause from the regulars).

We meet his neighbor the dog owner, a gay artist named Simon (Greg Kinnear), who is beaten up one day by the friends of one of his models; during his recovery, his agent and dealer (Cuba Gooding Jr.) insists that Melvin take care of the little dog, which has been rescued from the garbage. He doesn’t want to, but he does, and to his amazement (but not ours) he seems to grow fond of it.

“As Good as It Gets” was directed by James L. Brooks, whose films (“Terms of Endearment,” “Broadcast News”) give us original characters in unexpected lights. This film, co-written with Mark Andrus, creates fascinating people but is not quite willing to follow them down original paths. It is almost painful to see it stretching and contorting these characters in order to somehow fit them into a formula they’re dragged toward the happy ending kicking and screaming.

If the movie had been more or less ambitious it might have succeeded; as a sitcom crowd pleaser where a grumpy Scrooge let’s his heart soften, or else as a hard-hitting examination of the underlying irony in this lonely man’s wasted life. But “As Good as It Gets” is neither it’s a compromise, a film that tries to paste a smile on material that doesn’t wear one easily. Melvin won’t find lasting happiness, and the happy ending is like a blackout just before more unhappiness begins.

Yet there’s so much good stuff here in the dialogue, the acting, and especially in the observation that it often works even when it seems about to fail completely. Take, for example, what Melvin does for Carol’s son. The boy has asthma so bad he can hardly breathe sometimes; through Melvin she finds him (Harold Ramis), an ace doctor who helps her kid get better again. The material is right out of a silent weeper: Repentant Scrooge helps poor child to breathe again. But Brooks makes it new by casting Ramis and skewing the dialogue ever so slightly making it screwy.

The main story gets similar treatment. We know all along where these characters are headed because they’re already standing on each other’s footprints; First dogs then kids then women then gay neighbor is going to be OK with him but not until this part happens and she says that thing. What’s different is how we get there from here: When Melvin makes his belated visit to his old shrink, for example, they give him this perfect line: “How can you diagnose somebody with obsessive compulsive disorder and then criticize him for not making an appointment?”

There were times watching “As Good as It Gets” when I thought it might go over the top into greatness; it had the potential and all the pieces were in place. It was sad to see the story formulas take charge again maybe the studio, mindful of its $50 million investment, forced Brooks to tame his rowdy material. I can imagine an independent filmmaker with this dialogue and these characters taking them into the wild blue yonder; and Brooks, Nicholson and Hunt doing it too which is why I left the theater with a sense of opportunity lost.

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