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It’s been over 35 years, and yet, as I watched Chinatown for the first time, I wasn’t thinking only of how the life of its director, Roman Polanski, has changed irrevocably. I was also thinking of the film’s star, Jack Nicholson, and how his career took a major turn after the 1974 film noir. Now, it goes without saying (but just in case you’ve got an itch to send off a vitriolic e-mail, I’m prepared), but Polanski and Nicholson are really nothing alike. One man was convicted in a court of law for raping an underage girl; the other just became something of a flashy, charismatic shell of his past performances. But it’s hard not to bring in baggage when you’re watching a movie starring one of the most well-known American actors and directed by such a controversial figure.

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.

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