Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  Alex Gates must release himself from the cause of his suffering. He must separate from what he wanted most to retain whatever remains of what he now needs most: his life. A disease, a cancer, is hurled into the water as a cleansing. Though scenically similar, the difference between the exact act in Blood and Wine vs. Flight to Fury is that the later movie uses the jewels as a radioactive and destructive element. Alex Gates must remove the source of his family’s, his career’s, his life’s destruction. Jay Wickham instead retains control to the end by disposing of the valuables so they will not be found and reward anyone else, the “If I can’t have it, no one else can” philosophy. Denying others becomes a twisted victory for such a man.

  He wears white, but Jay is certainly a villain. As is Alex. The difference is that Jay revels in his wickedness, while Alex denies it. Alex accumulates ruthlessness, figuratively destroying his family and literally causing the death of his wife.

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  Villains kill. If not people, then hope. In The Shooting, Batman, The Departed, Flight to Fury and Blood and Wine, people die. Some are good and some are in the way of the villains, while others are the sort simplistically labeled “innocent victims.” These men will not hesitate to inflict pain or exercise authority. They kill with a fixed grin or a mobster’s detachment. They murder for purpose or gain. They defeat others and are defeated by themselves, perhaps the defining quality of a villain. Heroes, in contrast, must live up to an ideal often created by others or an accomplishment that transcends the time of its achievement—turning a moment into an eternity. Astronaut, president, news anchor. All are symbols. Yet all are people, living with their limitations that reality uses to restrict us all.

  If we are actors, we choose the wider vistas of villainy. If we are mortals, we aspire to the lower percentage of heroism. In life, heroism can be extremely important yet totally uncelebrated. In movies, heroism can be less rich than playing the “bad guy.”

  Would you rather be a bland hero or an exciting villain? Jack Nicholson is not the first actor, nor the one millionth person, to answer that bad beats good … any day.

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  * * *

  Men on a Mission

  It’s in their eyes. Always intent and never idle. Every detail scanned, each face studied, all situations evaluated. Darting, squinting, focusing, reacting, anticipating, homing, searching, narrowing, straining. Eyelids glued open in intense concentration. Or they blink with hummingbird-like rapidity, while recording and analyzing and storing, taking nothing for granted and everything as potential.

  The searchers search outside, out in the open and with the widest, most grand area to cover. Sun, dust, nature, noise and reality itself all distract but do not dissuade these men from their mission. Since they seek only the quest, they do not note one another, as those outside the mission are irrelevant. One is a retired cop, still obsessed with the final case of his career, the still-unsolved murder of a child. So he will not note a radio operator, struggling to make contact with his command. Nor could he possibly care about a couple of guys crossing off another goal from their ultimate list of to-dos. Or even someone desperate and shaken, focused only on one adult male and caring nothing about anything childlike despite his prey having stolen a child away. A border guard has everything to worry about, while the labor organizer’s under control and all business.

  Great actors play great people. They also bring flawed people to life, dramatizing faults and obsessions and neuroses. Or psychoses. Sometimes the mission can become the psychosis, a promise can become the trap. In The Pledge and The Crossing Guard, Nicholson’s promises become obsessions that imprison his characters, cornering the men until they give everything, including everything beyond reason. Both were directed and co-produced by Sean Penn, who also wrote The Crossing Guard, in which Nicholson makes a promise to himself to kill the drunk driver who killed his young daughter. In The Pledge, he makes a promise to the mother of a little girl to find the girl’s killer. Yet even then, the promise was to himself, the retiring detective who had to prove his worth by solving one more case, a cold case that had implicated the wrong man.

  Little girls dead. Men dead and dying inside, living off only one thing: their commitment to avenge those children, a postmortem protection too late to matter to the little girls and too little to accomplish more than merely elevate their own self-worth.

  In The Pledge, Jerry Black becomes so fixated upon tracking one young girl’s killer that he’s blinded to the fact that he turns another young girl into live bait, betraying his lover and her daughter in the service of pursuing the case. His pledge is sacred, because he promises it to another mother, one who is at her most vulnerable and raw, and because the perception about his entire career—and his worth as a cop—is at stake in this last desperate effort.

  Nicholson felt that his character was so driven to solve the murder as “his way of fighting back against all the shit in the world and all the meaninglessness out there. He’s trying to find some purpose and vindication in a life that’s become a black hole.”1

  The opening scene of The Pledge is a harrowing one, with a completely disassociated man, silent or near-silently ranting to himself or to imaginary others, with Jack’s appearance bloated and shockingly punished.

  Upon going back in time, he looks like the character in The Border several years on, which is fitting because he is a cop again, but retiring to an emptier future as in About Schmidt. Sean Penn then sets the scene, while Nicholson applies his full character energy into developing a name and a situation into a complex and multifaceted person. The low, soft voice of Jerry’s hesitant promise contrasts the police veteran’s normally intense demeanor. He starts to lose it, becoming more upset when seeing his own image on TV, with distress setting in as his manner becomes more fractured, confused and visibly shakier.

  The investigating detective must connect with his subjects, projecting empathy and involvement to elicit essential information and engender trust. Nicholson conveys this warm, sensitive and inquisitive feeling in his scene with Vanessa Redgrave, who portrays the murdered child’s grandmother. As he interviews one of the child’s classmates and other possible witnesses, you can sense that this is a man thinking and discovering at that moment in time, reacting in the moment. Black is troubled and perplexed, increasingly frantic in his demeanor with a psychiatrist (Helen Mirren), exhibiting a subtle growth in distress, degree by degree. When she touches him, he looks like a man who hadn’t been touched in quite some time, showing longing and unease that’s tentative in its childlike uncertainty.

  Jerry makes this promise to a mother, a person like so many others to whom he’s had to intone, “I’m sorry for your loss.” This time, he got a little too personal and went beyond the standard “do everything we can” to making a specific, definite and emotional pledge. That mission had to destroy him, as he worked against a system that wants clean, easy solutions without loose ends and inquisitive second-guessers. Turning the case into a personal quest had to be Jerry’s downfall. He set the conditions. He established the rules. Without cracking the case and keeping his pledge, this retiring cop becomes a sad and sodden nobody, with one dead little girl knocking down years and decades of the finest performance as one of the town’s finest.

  Nicholson attributed the strength of his portrayal to his ability to identify with the character. “It was a very dark character [with] a sense of hopelessness and absurdity to his life and those are philosophical kinds of issues that have always been very close to my heart.”2

  There’s a scene in a clothing store, in which Lori (Robin Wright Penn as the mother of a little girl that Jerry eventually uses as bait) and daughter Chrissy (Pauline Roberts) inquire about a red dress. We get the realization that Jerry is using that girl as a lure, a shocking reality that then ties back to a previous scene when this surrogate father, latter-day lover and manly protector purposefully places a new swing set right by the road—and we now know why.

  Betrayal takes full
form when he sends Chrissy toward the suspect known as the Wizard, knowing that he represents total danger and seeing that the Wizard has a telltale porcupine candy. That betrayal is shown in Jerry’s cold stare at Lori, the stare of another dangerous man and sociopath, the one who was supposed to be protecting them.

  On the stakeout, Jerry’s eyes get unnaturally big. During Lori’s attacking confrontation, as she berates Jerry for his betrayal, he breaks from reality, no longer seeing or hearing her, and becoming fully convincing as a man who believes he is alone and studying the scene of a crime not committed. Unless that crime is his own against his lover and her daughter.

  The end of the film returns us to the scene introduced at the film’s opening. Jack’s quick transitions between expressions and among emotions—from happiness and pissed off, to searching and finding, to certainty and the shaking anger of loss—happens as if in fast motion, a compressed time. At once, Jerry becomes the cop again, yet within the body of an alcohol-addled bum. He rolls the evidence around in his head, re-interviewing witnesses not there, and accusing suspects seen but not present.

  This sequence, revealing a roll call of emotional range, is reminiscent of one in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in which Nicholson sits down towards the end of the inmates’ illicit party to show McMurphy contemplating what’s happening, what’s happened, and what may still happen, seamlessly transitioning between disparate emotions and expressions within mere moments.

  The Pledge revolves around a crime of one dead girl and the criminal misuse of a trusting and loving relationship to bolster a retiring police detective’s self-image on his final case. The other crime was that Jerry was right all along and all alone in being so. He did keep his pledge without even knowing it, and without anyone else believing it; in the end he gets no credit for sanity, let alone discernment and superior insight.

  Of course, that applies to the simplified, if not “dumbed down” version that was the final release. Actor Tom Noonan, who leads the parish and was seemingly proven as the Wizard and a pedophile killer, explained to me that he was in fact not the killer. “I was in two other scenes with Jack that were never shot, because they ran out of money,” Noonan explained, pointing out that this then necessitated a more ham-fisted ending that provided Jerry’s character with the ultimate pyrrhic victory.3

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  Freddy Gale of The Crossing Guard also exists for a promise, waiting for a prisoner to be released to meet his execution at Freddy’s hand. Freddy must kill the man who killed his little girl, but Freddy is no cop and resides outside of the justice system. Nicholson creates three men as one character: a boozy strip club lecher with money; a wasted, blasted, mentally disabled father; and a predatory, monstrous man on a murderer’s mission.

  In his initial appearance, wordless at first, Nicholson looks like a real person, thus setting the tone for the piece. Is this his most real performance? Critics talked about “underplaying” in About Schmidt, but this film shows him disappearing into a role as much as someone we can’t help but recognize can ever hope to do.

  As seen many times before, Nicholson seems to revel in looking far less than star-like. As he gets out of bed with a stripper, he’s not afraid to look real and really terrible, tired and hung-over and sporting man-boobs. Without our seeing his face, Nicholson is also able to convey that this man is on a mission, with purpose and focus.

  John Savage, star of The Deer Hunter and Bobby in The Crossing Guard, related to me that when director Sean Penn asked him to play another collateral victim in a scene, he gave his performance a wrenching reality by drawing upon his own recovery and his work with Mothers Against Drunk Driving.4 The intercuts between Bobby weeping as he tells his story of personal pain to a support group, contrasted with Gale’s debauchery in a strip club with his own support group of drunken losers, shows how different men deal with the same tragedy in dramatically different ways.

  Later, when Freddy talks about his “job in life” with his ex-wife (Anjelica Huston), the mother of their deceased child, we believe it. Huston was affected by their scenes together, explaining that it “always broke my heart when Jack played damaged men.” She hadn’t seen Nicholson for a few years and “I think Sean asked me asked me to play the part of Jack’s ex-wife because of our history.”5 Penn confirms that he “thought that history would be invaluable, particularly because it would just set a level of honesty to the film.”6

  Nicholson uses his face and body to become a uniquely powerful actor. His success in portrayal and triumph in embodiment are testament to an actor in command of his physical tools and conscious of their use, moment to moment and life to life.

  The Crossing Guard (1995) featured key scenes between former lovers Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, who had not seen the actor for a few years prior to being put together by director Sean Penn “because of our history.”

  After a confrontation inside a strip club, Nicholson moves his head back and forth in a manner to provide a view inside his character’s mind, navigating between extremes of disbelief, torment and menace. When he pulls out a gun and cocks it, he is not an actor, but a man concentrating on that mission, driven to a goal that’s neither commendable nor condemnable. He must. Not for pleasure, not even for satisfaction, but because of the pledge made to his dead daughter. Even Freddy thinks the promise is to himself. Nevertheless, he must become the father he was not while she was alive. He must undo the hurt she can no longer feel.

  In a scene that takes place in a bathroom, Gale is on the phone with his ex-wife, Mary. We witness a man full of pain that’s authentic, the cry of a man who doesn’t cry much, a moment of complete agony and with no affect.

  Watching Freddy’s final diner scene with Mary, you can only hurt for these people, because they cared, they loved, they lost, they suffered. Together, Nicholson and Huston’s characters share tenderness and intensity—that is, until Gale spots pity. He suddenly morphs from broken parent to blind, unthinking monster, lashing out and breaking out so hard and so fast that his attack—hoping that she “fucking dies”—is shockingly real. He’s dangerous and heart-wrenching at once, a seeming illogical combination that Nicholson pulls off in this essence of character energy.

  Later, when Gale kisses a little girl (obviously thinking of his own), it’s another piece of your heart dripping away, in a sequence reminiscent of the Nicholson-scripted The Trip, when Peter Fonda wanders into a home and converses with a young girl played by Caren Bernsen.

  As volatile and explosive as Freddy is portrayed, there are also moments that enrich the character with lightness and vulnerability. A scene with director Sean Penn’s mother and her “perfect fucking seven” ring size is comic genius of a sort that we could only wish would be more evident in some of the comedies Nicholson has made. He dances, rolls on a stripper pole with dexterity, and stretches our definition of the man in his scene with Kari Wuhrer, who called the experience “one of the greatest movie moments of my life.”7

  The final confrontation is masterful, an old, tired and broken man against a strong yet weakened, imprisoned man. They are the same while they are different. They chase and they play, but without the playfulness of any sort of game.

  Freddy Gale needs only the failed vengeance of the seriocomic scene in his prey’s trailer to have accomplished a full career of greatness. Fumbling and failure are associated with broad physical comedy rather than a personal psychological collapse, but Nicholson plays it so that it fits and makes sense. As the two men eventually surrender to the worthlessness of it all, one the killer (of the little girl) and the other the killed (caused by her loss), they kneel down in shared pain and join hands—making you share their moment.

  Penn described the film’s themes as recognition that some tenderness is always possible, and the question of how to deal with unbearable loss. The screenwriter and director explained this response as a lifelong effort to maintain sensitivity and compassion despite having it beaten out of us, every day, bit by bit.8


  Nicholson’s Freddy Gale is a complex man, a portrayal that takes character energy and turns it into deeply flawed flesh-and-blood truth. In this world, a fist’s thud on a cemetery’s ground signals the moment when a new life begins. Revenge is not sweet, but a self-destruction that leads to redemption and resurrection.

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  Charlie Smith has an entirely different promise to keep. In The Border, Charlie is overwhelmed by the aspirations of his wife, knowing he cannot fulfill them, but still going along because he is not in charge. Charlie is not in charge of his life at home, resulting in a loss of control over his job as border cop.

  Charlie Smith is a nondescript name for a nondescript guy. It’s Five Easy Pieces turned right and gone south, as his wife Marcy (Valerie Perrine) unfavorably compares to Bobby’s lover Rayette (Karen Black) in the earlier film. Marcy fancies herself a budding TV star, but her appeal can only relate to sex. She has no talent, while Rayette was a good singer. Marcy is selfish and extremely materialistic, the opposite of Rayette’s giving and loving personality. Rayette made Bobby a better person, while Marcy came close to destroying Charlie both as border agent and as a man. She spends what he does not have. Home, furniture, swimming pool, waterbed. She cannot control herself—because she doesn’t want to—and he cannot control her.