His third phase reveals an older man who’s cleaned up. Mature and philosophical in tone, this O’Neill speaks in a subdued way again, but more due to growth than self-seriousness. His vocal expression is muted and steady, underneath the line of dialogue like the way singer kd lang winds her way just below the line of melody for effect. Her legato style, smooth and connected, reminds me of the easy, measured timbre of Nicholson’s dialogue style during this phase.
Nicholson explained how he found a key that unlocked O’Neill for him to show this progression: “the fact that [O’Neill] couldn’t write with anything but a pencil.” This seemingly small point mattered to the characterization that Nicholson created. “He couldn’t adapt to the typewriter. He couldn’t dictate,” which became essential when the playwright came down with a degenerative disease and was unable to hold that pencil.20
On Reds, Nicholson earned an Academy Award by taking us through three acts of an author’s life, as represented in subtle tonality. People grow, they change, they get knocked down and learn; reflecting, reaching, relaxing. Character energy doesn’t have to be broad and attention-grabbing. Instead, it can be as small as a person’s daring; as vulnerable as an unloved lover; and as wise and weary as we all become.
* * *
Less rich and fulfilled is Nicholson’s assignment, for want of a more attractive word, as Bernstein—oh sorry, make that Forman. Heartburn is a case of major talent and minor result. Mike Nichols (Carnal Knowledge, The Fortune, Wolf); Meryl Streep (Ironweed); Stockard Channing (The Fortune); Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest); Jeff Daniels (Terms of Endearment); Maureen Stapleton (Reds); cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Goin’ South); editor Sam O’Steen (Carnal Knowledge, Chinatown, Wolf) and others all worked on far superior productions with Nicholson than this.
What is unclear is the audience the film was intended for. Not involving enough to be pure drama, nor funny enough to be a comedy, and not likely to be considered a romantic comedy, this dour, inessential film is just not satisfying or worth all of the talent poured into it.
At least writer Nora Ephron didn’t make herself out to be a princess compared to a surrogate ogre husband. Both characters often are unlikable and thus theoretically suited for one another. As for the Washington Post reporter and Watergate hero, Nicholson makes him appealing in a mechanical, practiced manner when courting Streep’s Rachel, an appropriate portrayal of a womanizer blessed with less personal aplomb and élan than Nicholson himself.
On their wedding day, he becomes sweet and light while she devolves into a whiny “Bridezilla” before the title had been coined. The pair then become very convincing as bickering spouses, disgusted at each other and about everything else, until their warm reconciliation and joy when Rachel lets out the news of a baby on the way. Jack’s “ooh, baby” is charming and provides depth to his character, as does the couple’s best scene together when celebrating by eating pizza and singing duets of songs featuring the word “baby.”
Nicholson, of course, likes to croon on film and presents his most lively and winsome moment as Forman when performing “My Boy Bill” in full Broadway style and mock-melodramatics. Streep considered the moment “so wonderful—never keeping what other men might consider his customary cool.” He sings again when the baby is born, addressing “I Sing to You” with contentment and tenderness. His co-star recounted how she had to turn away in response to “all the emotion that came pouring out of him” and his willingness to show it all “as if he had nothing to lose.”21
There are two other warm highlights. In a reconciliation scene at a fountain, Nicholson chokes up and harkens back to his earlier courtship mode. Later, he helps Streep as she prepares to give birth again, recounting the story of the chancy delivery of their first child. His character is back in that original moment, feeling the same feelings as they were experienced at the time. This is sentiment, not sentimentality. He completely breaks down, in shame and in love, reminiscent of the Five Easy Pieces monologue with his character’s father.
There is one Jacksplosion, as Nicholson blows up at contractors (one of whom is comedian Yakov Smirnoff) who forget to make a door from the kitchen into the house. Otherwise, you can’t help thinking about how Streep and Nicholson’s characters in Ironweed were so much more rich and endearing, with range and empathy. That couple had nothing, yet were happier and more fulfilling as people than this couple, who possess everything—except interest.
* * *
A reporter of another sort is found in a film that’s certainly of another sort, that being David Locke in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger. Originally titled Professione: reporter, this existential study of identity and responsibility features one of Nicholson’s most naturalistic portrayals, reacting to the moment as it happens and the situation as it emerges.
The opening places the character in the Saharan North African location of his documentary and with native peoples in just as careful and leisurely a manner as did Tony Richardson’s opening of The Border, both of which did so without the intrusion of narrative dialogue.
This self-crucifixion from The Passenger follows the film’s sole “Jacksplosion,” a result of a losing battle between man and machine that leads Nicholson’s character, Locke, to beat an inanimate object—his jeep—with a shovel to the point of exhaustion.
Nicholson looks like he belongs in this setting and is part of what transpires, even as an outsider. This sense of true place provides a key to his clarity and success as an actor. There is a Nicholson moment, a Jacksplosion, early in the film when he throws a fit at his vehicle, mirroring man against machine of transport as in Five Easy Pieces and The Border, and by Micky Dolenz in Nicholson’s co-written Monkees cult favorite Head. Here, his Jeep gets caught in the sand and Nicholson flings himself fully into beating the inanimate object with a shovel to the point of exhaustion, the kind of exhaustion that’s from defeat rather than fatigue. He crouches down, plunging his fists into the sand like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes and unconvincingly spits that he does not care.
A political documentary journalist, Locke trades identity with a dead man—a man he had just met—seemingly as a result of a spontaneous decision with no need and no rationale. When Locke stares down at the body of David Robertson, who died in his hotel room after the pair make their acquaintance, it’s as if Locke is looking at a version of himself, so intent and tender, not because of any interpersonal connection but because of an internal, inner bond. Nicholson’s character decides that he instead will be the one to die, but without the responsibility of dying.
He exchanges photos on passports, changes clothes and rooms. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know what the man does and can’t know what he will have to do in order to take Robertson’s place.
The common wording for this act is “assuming the identity” of another. Here, the word “assuming” takes on further meanings. Locke is assuming he can pull this off without being discovered in the first few minutes. He’s assuming that he can improvise some sort of reasonable simulation of a stranger’s life based on the scant agenda from a calendar of appointments. Most essential, he’s assuming, in order to make it possible, no one else will care any more than he does.
A colleague, interviewed about Locke’s death, noted that the reporter had a “great detachment,” an ironic choice of phrase given that the subject had just detached himself from his own life, his identity, his connections and his responsibilities (as in Five Easy Pieces).
As the switch takes place, Antonioni’s pans span time as well as space, setting the tone for memory as foreshadowing and for effect as cause. It’s also a masterful moviemaking technique. The director uses the full width of the screen, depicting the outdoors as landscape and people often as part of that landscape rather than foreground to it.
In a circular conversation with co-star Maria Schneider, the characters touch upon memory, relationships and the nature of reality. Does it matter if you can remember some
thing or can stay connected with other people? If people disappear whenever they leave a room, do they matter and do they still exist? Can you exchange yourself for another with no consequences—or, more harrowingly, with no notice?
With his subtle performance, Nicholson portrays Locke as somewhat more engaged in his new persona, not because he’s more interested in gunrunning than reporting or more purposeful as Robertson than Locke. Uncertainty makes this inevitable. Locke can no longer merely play by the rules because he doesn’t know what’s supposed to happen next, let alone what the rules might be.
Aside from the attack on his Jeep, there is another more physical scene to complement this more understated and more cerebral portrayal. Locke rides in a cable car, like Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in The Third Man, traveling over water. Nicholson waves his arms like wings, which gives the appearance of graceful flight from the perspective directly above. In 1975, we are seeing a more artful precursor to a later scene on the bow of the Titanic that featured Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, or a more stylized reenactment of Nicholson riding with Captain America in Easy Rider. This transported illusion of flight is echoed later in the film when Maria Schneider rides in the back of a white convertible with red leather interior through a green-treed forest, a living part of the living beauty, a moving aspect of a stationary tree-lined road. At this moment, the otherwise understated Nicholson doesn’t have to pretend to be happy and buoyant. Upon meeting the “Girl,” he loses a few years and appears to become a more joyful and youthfully energetic Nicholson.
She is fresh, voluptuous and spontaneous. As he waits in a bar for Maria’s character (she is never given a name), Nicholson is waiting, not pretending to wait, and not knowing that the waiting will be over at a defined, scripted point. He spins a glass on the bar as if his character can remain there for hours or be interrupted in just a moment. The glass is not a prop but an object of his attention, just as an orange becomes one in a post-intimacy scene with Schneider. He toys with the orange throughout their conversation. It is always handled but never eaten. It is not opened or peeled, nor is there any intention to use the orange as an orange. Similar imagery of meaningful orange manipulation occurs in Nicholson’s directorial debut Drive, He Said and in his scripted LSD exploration The Trip.
Antonioni found it difficult working with Nicholson and Schneider at the same time because they were such completely different actors, “natural in opposite ways: Nicholson knows where the camera is and acts accordingly,” while Maria “just lives the scene” with a gift for improvisation. “I see the film in its unity whereas the actor sees a film through his character.”22
Nicholson provides another glimpse into a real, living man beneath the resignation in the reporter’s footage when a witch doctor turns the camera around on the interviewer, revealing an embarrassed, abashed, surprised and schoolboyish response, as real as a documentary moment should be. He is natural in his unnatural reaction and its attendant feeling, providing the only point in the film that we see the celebrated Jack Nicholson smile.
The most notable part of The Passenger is seven minutes in duration. A single, historic and masterful shot worthy of Welles himself (The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil), this extremely slow zoom (an anti-zoom?) is the ultimate penultimate shot in the history of cinema. This is not a movie scene as much as a physical construction of life and death, action and negation, everything and nothing, denouement and ambiguity. These seven minutes took 11 days to shoot, because the wind made it difficult to keep the camera steady.
Simultaneously detached and removed (because we are seeing, yet missing the real action) while intrusive and probing (because we enter Locke’s room to reveal his fate), the shot pits motion against entropy. The director wanted him “part of the landscape … [b]ut not specifically on him.”23 Locke does become Robertson, an unglamorous and unimportant death in a remote hotel room bed. This time, a person enters a room in order to disappear. His true identity is revealed after the point it can ever matter to him. Meanwhile, the landscape provides the form, as cars pass, people walk by, and a lifeless life concludes.
In Becoming Jack Nicholson, Shaun Karli explains that the quest for authentic choices dominates the actor’s performance: “Nicholson’s personal understanding of existentialism informs both his choice of roles and his acting technique.” Locke’s change of identity is therefore based on the existentialist notion that individuals create their identities through their choices.24
Like a werewolf, the original identity of a man returns at the point of death. David Locke is David Locke again, after having assumed the dead form of another, as an empty form haunting the life of David Robertson. “He’s a witness, not a protagonist,” Antonioni explained.25 In a tripled connection, Robertson’s character in the film was played not by an actor, but by an associate producer on The Last Detail and later producer on The Postman Always Rings Twice, because of his supposed resemblance to Nicholson. Charles Mulvehill also provided the name (though misspelled as Mulvihill) for the hated detective who becomes Polanski’s sidekick when performing a little nose surgery on J.J. Gittes in Chinatown.
* * *
Another reconnection happened on the film As Good as It Gets with actress Shirley Knight, who plays Helen Hunt’s mother Beverly Connelly.
Best-known for her Oscar-nominated supporting performance in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth and more recently The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, this accomplished stage and screen actress studied her art together with Nicholson nearly 40 years before they appeared together in this James L. Brooks award-magnet.
Thirteen years after that triumph, Knight spoke to me at length about her career, the craft of acting and Jack Nicholson:
I’ve known Jack, he and I were in acting class together in 1959. So I’ve known him for so long. And he married a girl in the class, her name was Sandra Knight—and over the years, everybody thinks we were married, because Shirley Knight, Sandra Knight. And so we were doing the movie, and Jack as a joke says, “You know, Shirley, people think that we were married.” And I said, “Yes, I know, Jack.” And he said, “You know, I really miss our marriage.” Helen [Hunt] was standing right there and Helen said, “You guys were married?” and I was like, “I give up, I give up.” But that’s him, he’s a joker.26
Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a successful writer, but one whose storms are internal. Cripplingly obsessive-compulsive, he can work, but he cannot truly live. His first breakthrough is not another human being, but a dog. The iconic poster didn’t depict him holding up Simon’s Brussels Griffon, Verdell, because the dog was cute (though it was), but because it represented the bridge between aloneness—being alone with his writing, his piano and his clean isolation—and togetherness.
Yet even that was a rough transition. In his first scene with Verdell (Jill the Dog), Jack uses his harshest voice and attitude aside from his first confrontation with Simon (Greg Kinnear) and Frank (Cuba Gooding, Jr.).
This is a film of many Jacks. We see the exploring and expressive Nicholson, who holds up the dog as she pees with the same freedom and in the same fashion as Jack himself in Wolf (raining on James Spader’s loafers) and About Schmidt. We see the rom-com lead, though romantically alone in this case, reading his own work aloud in a voice so soft and with an expression so relaxed and open that he could just as easily be David in The King of Marvin Gardens.
There’s a hard and hurtful Jack, who is compelled to chide Simon about his plight and appearance after being brutally attacked. He does wrong, as when observing that Carol’s (Hunt) son might die soon, in the same tone and significance as if describing an oncoming storm or the tough pitcher taking on the home team. This is when the subtlety of meaning takes over.
You glimpse a sudden but brief understanding that he’s done wrong, a slow absorption into a being who is there but is at this point still mostly dormant. Hunt attacks Nicholson and berates him for an acknowledgment, but he ta
kes forever to answer with his longest and most meaningful “Yes” response, a stuttered affirmative that’s delicate and genuine. “Yes” may well be Jack Nicholson’s favorite word as an actor, possibly because so few use it importantly, yet alone take it seriously, while this actor has consciously decided to give it the attention and intent it actually and truly deserves.
Shirley Knight delved inside the actor’s mind, as only a true acolyte of the profession could. “Jack is so comfortable in his own skin. You know, he’s one of these people who really knows who he is and doesn’t censor himself. People say to me, ‘What’s Jack Nicholson like?’ And I say, ‘You know what you see? That’s what you get. That’s him.’”27
There’s the classic Jack, during his “don’t come knocking” speech at his apartment door, wherein he employs his arsenal of expressions, heel-rises, speech patterns and accents, his motion and countenance clipped and pushed forward, aggressively delivering shot after shot after shot to Lupe Ontiveros (also from The Border).
Nicholson sings to his canine friend, using the Monty Python’s Life of Brian theme song as bookend to their relationship. He purposefully adds “your” when giving a message for the dog and himself to “Always Look on the Bright Side of Your Life,” perhaps a strange sentiment for such a cheerless and antisocial personage. But, after Verdell leaves, Nicholson plays a sadder version of the tune as he laughs and cries in the same moment. This is when he starts to become a man, joining humanity rather than merely writing about it.
Storm-filled in life, Melvin is an easy writer. He writes romance novels yet lacks romance, or any meaningful relationship, in his life. Thus, the ironically titled As Good as It Gets (1997).
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