I wrote this review because, unexplainably, some people are under the impression that 'As Good as It Gets' is a good movie, or even 'has anything redeemable to offer at all'. I mean 85% Fresh? Several Best Actors and a Golden Globe for best picture!? Have I gone mad?
An "obsessive-compulsive, misanthropic, and bigoted romantic novelist named Melvin Udall"?
Imagine House and Monk in one movie - How can you lose? How can you screw that up? That is almos
t a perfect movie right there! Perhaps if it was written even slightly convincingly, or even exaggeratedly comical I would have liked this movie. What it ends up as, is a watery, insultingly underdeveloped, mockery of intelligent cinema that only managed to stave off boredom as I watched it by inciting intense waves of hatred. But I am getting ahead of myself.I wouldn't want to bias the audience.
The movie is essentially about three characters: THE CRANKY SOCIOPATH, THE SINGLE MOTHER and THE HOMOSEXUAL.
Now some people might find it offensive that I defined the entire character of THE HOMOSEXUAL by his gender preference, but it is not my doing. The character has nothing else. In fact the entire depth of these characters seem to delve to no more than what might have been scrawled on a napkin as Mark Andrus, the writer, lazily attempted to scratch a living as a HACK.
The amazingly awful thing about this movie is that, though these three characters can be summed up in a two-dimensional stereotype, it seems to be written by someone who has had no experience with any people remotely like them - as they each act out what isn't even a well fleshed out stereotype. Characters continually announce what cliches they're are supposed to be playing, as though the writer thought we needed to be reminded because of lazy acting. This is one of the few times I whole heartedly agree with him.
THE CRANKY OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE, lazily portrayed by a staggeringly elderly Jack Nicholson, has this unique character arc where he becomes progressively more annoying and unbelievable throughout the movie until you hate him and fervently disbelieve that THE SINGLE MOTHER somehow has changed her attitude and loves him now... for some reason.
In fact, the only way there could have been less chemistry would have been if the entire movie was set in a physics lab.
If you took this mov
ie as an accurate description of what obsessive-compulsive people are like, then you might believe that they are irrational people who have a smattering of typical and uninteresting rules which they rigidly enforce on themselves to great 'comedic effect' once or twice - and then easily ignore them for the rest of the movie. You'd further believe that instead of talking, they simply spew out mediocre one liners which are only soughta' insulting. On the plus side, their inability to interact with other people only happens when convenient.This movie might have escaped my scorn if they could have made THE CRANKY SOCIOPATH either actually funny/harsh, or if they could have made him even a little relatable/likeable/redeemable - as a character who is actually struggling with a real problem. As it is, he floats in this limbo state of 'me not caring at all'. The fact that
people gave his character so many awards, only tells me how desparate people are for interesting characters like this. You can do a hell of a lot better than this, people!The movie continues to head up poorly defined paths only to go nowhere or pretend that it never happened. There are three or four major sub-plots that never go anywhere, the main character's dying kid, or the black guy that we never really understood who he was - or even the street kid who they spent so much time and energy building up an emotional connection and back story who disappeared half-way through the movie and never came back. It's easily twice as bad as the sub-plots from the Transformer movie.
In fact at least half of the movie is spent around what is happening to THE HOMOSEXUAL - all about his money issues, physical injuries, crashing artistic career, his friends leaving him, the long road trip to visit his parents with whom he has unresolved tensions with, or his blossoming heterosexual feelings for THE SINGLE MOTHER which is only slightly more convincing than the Nicholson/Hunt relationship - and NONE of these are resolved whatsoever. WHATSOEVER!
(The road trip to visit his parents ends with him saying that he for some reason doesn't need to see them any more and they drive back - I'm serious... we don't even see them)
However, I guess there were two good things I could say about this movie. It had heart, and a good dose of twists.
Well... when I say heart, I mean an overly melodramatic piano played loudly over THE CRANKY GUY crying over a cute dog in what was supposed to be a magical character changing moment. This happened like ten minutes into the film, waaay before we knew that it was supposed to be out of character for him.
Also gross and baffling Jack Nicholson make-outs? Am I right?
Aaand when I say twists, I mean characters saying things for no reason just so the writers can jack up the tension a lit
tle and not resolve it. And other characters reacting to things with no rational base, and other characters doing unexplainable things and then completely disappearing out of the movie. Or even an amazingly unsubtle case of THE CRANKY GUY saying "as good as it gets" in a pointless scene just so they could have a title for the film. (I hate that)In conclusion:
The movie was kind of like a kid with learning difficulties getting up on stage, ad-libbing a story about something he knows nothing about, and everyone cheering and giving him money.
Actually, please tell me the guys who made this have some kind of intellectual disability - not only would that make sense, but it would explain why they got so many awards.
Even so... it's still pretty bad.
Ha ha ha ha haaa!! Of all the films you pick to get frustrated about, it's 'As Good As It Gets'?!
ReplyDeleteWell, I can't fault you. As Good As It Gets falls into the category of films that think they're so deep and profound that they don't need to be consistent or accept responsibility for any faults.
I hate virtually any film where the central character or characters have barely even changed by the end of the film.
"I was a wife-beating, drug-addicted movie critic, but now I'm a wife-beating, drug-addicted movie critic that likes one film in particular by a black guy."
That's not a stab at any film I know of, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was the plot of some film somewhere.
Now Helmut, you need to pick your movies to critique.
ReplyDeleteIn Deconstructing Harry, for example, Woody Allen plays a New York writer unconcerned with offending anyone with his vulgar behavior. Sometimes Woody pulls it off and other times he just seems small. In As Good as It Gets,however, Jack Nicholson plays the same type of character, but when Jack does it, it really sparkles.
As Melvin Udall, I think that this is Jack at his best, the kind of role that makes him a star. He gets to bear his teeth, take control of a room, and be devilishly cuddly at the same time. He deliciously delivers the most unconventionally rude dialogue in years. It reminds me, Helmut, of him plying Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick or his R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Melvin's excuse for his behavior is that he's diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive. He walks around New York not stepping on any cracks in the sidewalk. He wears gloves for everything. He washes his hands and throws away the soap. He eats at the same restaurant every day at the same time with the same waitress, Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt) - Monk, Helmut, with CLASS!
He is generally perceived as a grinch, but in As Good as It Gets, certain circumstances happen that cause Melvin to perform good deeds. His gay artist neighbor, Greg Kinnear, gets attacked by a band of thugs(aka models). He has to go to the hospital and Melvin ends up watching that silly little mop dog that he pretends to hate, but soon comes to love. At the same time, Carol has a chronically asthmatic son who must be rushed off to the hospital several times a month, upsetting Melvin's eating schedule. So, Melvin sends a top-notch doctor to their house so that Carol can come back to work and feed him.
Cuba Gooding Jr. who talks Melvin into taking a road trip to Kinnear's parents' house to ask them for money for his hospital bills. Melvin asks Carol to come along. What happens on the trip is pretty great and nearly unpredictable. I think that H Hunt is an amazing actress. She is a great comedienne who can slip into drama effortlessly. Gooding is as too small.
Helmut, Mark Andrus (who also wrote the story) is a good writer! This is a very smart script by Just that fact that Melvin's rude dialogue sounds natural, chronic, offensive and funny at the same time is a major feat. And that the story works so well on top of it. Where there could have been a lot of phony stuff, there's a well balanced story and great characters. Brooks as a director knows how to get great performances out of his actors, and keep the pace going. The movie is 150 minutes long, but it feels like a scant 90 minutes. It never slows down or gets old. True, his vision of New York is a little too clean, especially for the neat-freak Melvin. It would have been funny to see Melvin try and survive in a grimy Scorsese-esque New York. But this is a small gripe. As Good as It Gets is a very enjoyable, very funny, very charming movie, and I was able to lose myself in it.
so there!
James L. Brooks' sitcom roots are all too readily apparent in "As Good as It Gets," a sporadically funny romantic comedy with all the dramatic plausibility and tonal consistency of a TV variety show. The filmmaker's ability to deliver crowd-pleasing entertainment remains intact, as the outrageous one-liners of Jack Nicholson's hopelessly misanthropic, anti-p.c. leading character snap one to attention, and the various narrative zigzags will keep viewers on their toes. But this arch film changes mood and apparent intention virtually every other minute, creating a messy and finally off-putting ambiance that makes the three main characters and their problems become tiresome well before the far-too-long postponed denouement. Pic's blatantly accessible humorous and emotional elements should land this in the commercial winner's circle, although reported $75 million-plus budget puts recoupment a good way off.
ReplyDeleteAt its best, as in "Terms of Endearment" and "Broadcast News," Brooks' work manages to deftly blend comedy and sentiment to create a credible impression of heightened reality. Here, the familiar components are present, but are thrown together in a such a haphazard, ill-considered manner that any hope of dramatic coherence and complete characterizations is entirely undercut.
At the same time, the director fully indulges a previously fitful tendency toward overstatement and exaggeration, just as he has acquired an acute case of the cutes. Brooks' policy this time out seems to have been, when in doubt, cut away to the performing dog.
Despite a jumble of uncertain coverage and unseemly editing, opening scenes contain considerable promise. In an obviously comic context, middle-aged New York City curmudgeon Melvin Udall (Nicholson) defines himself as the neighbor from hell by tossing a little dog down the apartment building's garbage chute (the pooch unfortunately survives to figure prominently in the action from then on) and by gleefully assailing both Fido's gay owner Simon (Greg Kinnear) and the latter's black friend Frank (Cuba Gooding Jr.) in terms that would endear him to the KKK.
Melvin's sarcastic vitriol is so fearlessly extreme as to be outrageously funny at first exposure. But his obsessive-compulsive personality has, by this point in his life, become encrusted and moldy; he lives his entire life alone in his apartment, where he is busy finishing his 62nd book; he seemingly has no friends or family; and he emerges from his shell just once a day to (This is copied from RottenTomatoes) eat at the same restaurant, to which the germophobe brings his own plastic utensils and where he is tended to, and barely tolerated, by his favorite waitress, Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt).
Although a pretty good sport about everything, Carol has her own problems, the most serious --- and cliched --- of which is her asthmatic son Spencer. Typical of the film's uncertain approach to mixing comedy and pathos is the disastrous end of a date in which Carol's attempt at a little lovemaking with a young suitor is fatally interrupted by the sickly Spencer.
From the beginning, it is clear that the story has only one potential trajectory, that of the gradual humanization of Melvin. Unfortunately, the road to this end is considerably bumpier, longer and more contrived than anticipated.
The door to his self-awakening is opened by, of all things, Simon's dog, for which Melvin is obliged to care after the young painter is hospitalized after a brutal mugging. To Melvin's astonishment, he actually comes to love the mutt, which seemingly opens something in this Scrooge's heart to the point where he starts arranging for some unsolicited first-class medical care for Carol's son.
Ninety minutes in, pic takes a half-hour physical detour when Melvin is shanghaied into driving Simon and Carol down to Baltimore. The hotel stop involved provides a setting for some intimacy that may never have materialized otherwise, capped by Melvin's earthshaking confession to Carol that, "You made me want to be a better man." For his part, Simon, who has been impoverished by the medical expenses of his recuperation, also makes an emotional breakthrough on the trip.
But despite the strides made by all three characters toward a semblance of self-realization that was nowhere in sight at the outset, the ways they are achieved often seem forced and unconvincing. Some of this has to do with the abruptness and arbitrariness with which things happen in this lurching picture, which never finds a smooth road to travel. But much of it is also a result of the wildly varying tone, in which attempts at genuine human moments and credible emotion can be negated in an instant by cheap comic effects and overt pandering to the audience.
Representing the picture's virtues and flaws in a nutshell is Nicholson's performance, which is wonderfully enjoyable when Melvin remains an irascible s.o.b. but becomes unfathomable in its would-be tender moments. The character's background, and what made him the way he is, remains resolutely unexplored, and the actor increasingly resorts to shuffling and mugging to paste over the cracks in motivation.
Hunt's Carol is a more rounded and comprehensible creation, but the character isn't all that interesting and the notes Hunt hits, while true, never seem particularly surprising or unusual. Kinnear is decent as the superficially successful but insecure artist, while some of the performance of Cuba Gooding Jr., in his first role since winning an Oscar for "Jerry Maguire," must have been left on the cutting room floor, since he pops up only sporadically as a rather blustery plot facilitator.
John Bailey's lensing has a nice pastel quality that agreeably reflects the pic's modest physical dimensions. But Richard Marks' editing strains, against all but impossible odds, to smooth over the material's scattershot moods and impressions.
Overall I found the movie briskly sebacious.
Can everyone stop copying and pasting long articles. Just put in a link! This is the Internet, we have the technology.
ReplyDeleteOr better yet just, you know, write your own stuff.
No points for copying - minus points for trying to pass it off as your own. (Why?)
As for BetterThanItGet's Jeffrey Anderson review, there's no real point in arguing with someone who isn't even involved in the argument.
And I don't have much to say in the way of defence, mainly because I foresee any future argument quickly becoming a 'yes it is - no it isn't - yes it is' shuttlecock match, but I will say one thing.
The main selling point of this movie is Jack with OCD, right? The fact that he is sharp witted, lovable and interestingly obsessive.
I found all his one liners to be either unfunny or old hat. Unlike House.
I found no reason to sympathise with him, as the film made no attempt to connect his OCD with his unsociability nor showed any desire for a relationship. Unlike Monk.
And for all his hyped 'sparkly' OCD habits - gloves, hygiene, need for routine, sidewalk cracks - they were all the LEAST inventive 'copy straight from Wikipedia' quirks you could come up with. And even those are forgotten about for long stretches at a time.
Everything that character did, I've seen done elsewhere and better. Misanthropic characters are always a win, but it feels like this movie had an easy run just because there wasn't much to compare it to. Hopefully Pixar's 'UP' will finally convince you that you can do better. A lot better.
Just a quick question here, Jeffrey Anderson is the same reviewer who didn't like The Terminal right? Why are we quoting him?
i had no idea that film actually won awards... till i read this. yeah i hate it when films that are "serious" have unbeliveble storylines in there.. as if she would even consider going out with him in real life.
ReplyDeleteOuch!
ReplyDeleteI actually like this movie. So ner! I don't think it's a brilliant movie that needs to go down in history or anything, but I do like it.
Don't go trashing good ol' American films - not with our all american hero Jack!!
ReplyDeleteWe've got enough problems now that our last genuine super hero John McCain has been undermined by the godless left wing liberals and the AntiChrist hisself.
C'mon George W, time to invade the U.S. of A
Cletus Trubshaw
I guess, in the end, the reviewing process falls down because if someone enjoys the film it doesn't matter how bad it is, it still has merit.
ReplyDeleteSooo... where's that Valkyrie review?
ReplyDeleteIt blew up.
ReplyDeleteGET IT!! HAHAHAHA BUT IT SURVIVED AND STOPPED THE REVOLUTION HAHAHA THAT DIDN'T MAKE SENSE HAHAHA