Classic Movie Review: Chinatown
By Josh Spiegel
August 2, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Can we separate the artist from his personal life? People have been asking this question for decades and will continue to. Polanski is a great example, if only because there are some people who are so against the idea of ever supporting any of his work. Granted, I don’t remember the anger being pitched at such a high level when his Academy Award-winning 2002 Holocaust film, The Pianist was released. This isn’t to say that some of the anger isn’t well-placed; I appreciate and can understand the opinions these people have. Though he’s now once again a free man (relatively speaking, mind you), what Polanski did was wrong and he should have faced an appropriate charge during the original court case in Los Angeles. Getting into the nitty-gritty of why Polanski fled, and all of the related politics, is for another article.
Something that struck me as I watched Chinatown, which is, among many other things, rightly hailed as a masterpiece of its genre, was that Polanski’s style is either nonexistent or so sly that it appears to be nonexistent. There is, of course, something to be said for accurately evoking a time and place that almost seems to have never happened. Chinatown, the film, takes place in Los Angeles in 1937. Visually, the film looks right, always managing to envelop the audience in the atmosphere without ever shoving our faces in it. Too often these days, it seems like most movies and television shows with any kind of period setting like to remind us as often as possible about the setting (Mad Men is, it’s worth pointing out, a notable exception, as that show needs to envelop us in the time and place as much as Chinatown does).
As with any of the great noir stories, Chinatown’s plot is labyrinthine and convoluted, full of double-crosses, triple-crosses, and twists piled upon twists. The entry into this bright hell is Jake Gittes, a cop-turned-private-detective whose specialty is the same as any other private detective in these kinds of stories: taking pictures of cheating spouses for the distraught wife or husband who don’t want their fears confirmed. One such case walks into his office, a Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray. She wants her husband, a well-known engineer whose opinion may decide the fate of a new dam being built in the Los Angeles area, tailed because he may be cheating on her. What starts out as simple gets strange when another woman approaches Jake and informs him that she is Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray, not the first woman. To say that the situation gets messy afterward is an understatement.
Chinatown has many iconic moments - the final line, which occurs in the only scene set in the actual Chinatown in L.A., Faye Dunaway (as the real Evelyn Mulwray) shouting “My sister! My daughter!” - but it’s Gittes getting a nasty cut on his nose that stands out. Is it because the man inflicting the wound is played by none other than Polanski? That’s certainly part of what makes the scene so unique; how often do we see the lead character get beat up by the director? Hitchcock may have spoken ill of his actors, but he never went so far as to do the harm himself on celluloid. Polanski plays a jittery thug who attacks Gittes for sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, and takes that metaphor to a bloody conclusion. Gittes’ nose survives by the end, but the blood spilled there is the most in the film, notably so.
As Gittes investigates more, he not only falls in love with the real Mrs. Mulwray (and when Faye Dunaway’s looking as fetching as she does here, can you blame the guy?), but runs afoul of the man at the top of this pyramid, Noah Cross. Partly because Cross is played by iconic American director John Huston (who directed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon, and is the father of Danny and Anjelica Huston), I assumed that Cross would be a much more visible figure. Consider me shocked to find out that, in the film’s 130-minute length, Huston shows up for about 15 minutes. Don’t make the same mistake I did; though Huston is very good, using folksiness to hide his innate cruelty, and his character is very important, he’s just not as important to the screenplay, which garnered an Oscar for Robert Towne, as watching Gittes self-destruct.
That element of Chinatown is the most fascinating, and the most interesting if we apply it to the career of Jack Nicholson. This wasn’t nearly the beginning of the end for Nicholson as something more than just a catchphrase generator. It’s somewhere near The Shining (which, in case you get me wrong, is a great film featuring a volcanic lead performance) that Nicholson’s career tipped into self-parody. Though he’s never been as hammy as Al Pacino post-Scarface, Nicholson’s almost better known for being Jack Nicholson than for his roles anymore. When you watch him in films like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, you’re watching one of the best runs any actor could ever boast of. Yes, Five Easy Pieces has the infamous chicken salad scene, but Nicholson seemed more involved in becoming these men, as opposed to smirking and arching his eyebrows.
In Chinatown, Nicholson plays a very cocky man, someone who’s completely assured of his talents and his ability to ignore the past. We keep getting hints that something happened to Gittes when he was on the Los Angeles police force, but are never explicitly told what went down. We know it happened in Chinatown, we know it involved a woman, and we know it screwed Gittes up. When pretty much the same thing happens at the end of the movie (there’s a reason why Gittes is told at the end “It’s Chinatown”), it’s safe to assume that he won’t forget this time. Gittes plays things cool and loose throughout the movie, getting involved deeper and deeper, but not worrying because he figures that he’ll get out without any scratches. He’s not bad at what he does, but he’s bad at assuming he can ruin people’s livelihoods without getting caught.
Gittes’ future is unknown, but he could very well end up leaving the business, or he could coast on what he’s done in the past, snapping pictures of the unfaithful. The parallel with Nicholson is, sure, shaky, but if you look at his past 30 years of work, there are few films that don’t feature even a semblance of Nicholson’s public persona. Even in a film like A Few Good Men, which has one of his most memorable moments, his slightly evil smile, the devil-may-care look…it’s all there. Perhaps his best performance in the last decade came in a movie not many people remember: About Schmidt. It’s arguably his most affecting work in years, and precisely because it features no movie-star flash. You can almost look at Chinatown as the final meeting of Polanski and Nicholson working in the flashiest of settings.
Here, they’re both stars. Chinatown is an expertly made movie, filled with as much subtext and hidden meaning as there was in the great film noirs the film evokes. It is still a Hollywood movie, looking slick and polished. Polanski would, a few years later, leave the United States for good (or until some other wild twist comes along in his personal life); Nicholson would, after One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, slowly turn his professional life into his public life and become better-known for one-liners than fully realized performances. Though I don’t begrudge the future successes, these men may never have been as good as they were in Chinatown. More than 35 years later, that’s still a sad fact to consider, and hard to forget.