Nosy, Nosy Nicholson

CHINATOWN

Screenwriters, welcome to Heaven. Here's my pick for the best-written movie of all time. It's not as quotable as Gone With The Wind, nor is it as line-for-line stunning as Casablanca. But this gritty, shockingly nihilistic neo-noir, penned by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski, takes the cake due to its skillful structure, keen attention to character, staggering intelligence, and, most of all, its extraordinary economy. There is not a second that could conceivably be cut from Chinatown. Each self-contained shot, each crackling exchange of hard-boiled bons mots, each action, big or small, desperate or cunningly mapped out, sends the story zooming forward like an out-of-control freight train, until at last we arrive at that bloodcurdling final revelation, a twist so unimaginable and unwieldy in its power that, to this day, it's still the iconic silver-screen whoah! moment.

Our hero is PI JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a detective with all the rapier wit and hard-won ingenuity of one of Bogie's famous shamuses, but none of the bitterness; no matter what's happened to him before-and we learn, ultimately, that quite a lot has happened-he's a courtly, businesslike guy. He's hired by Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray to tail her husband, water tycoon Hollis (Darrell Zwerling). She thinks he's fooling around, and Gittes uncovers evidence of just that. However, it turns out the Evelyn Mulwray he met with was, in fact, an impersonator. The real one (Faye Dunaway), is disgraced, furious, and ready to press charges. Things really get complicated when Hollis is found drowned, most likely murdered. Hired by the real Evelyn to investigate her husband's death, Gittes uncovers a city-wide political conspiracy, and finds himself up against not just a few evasive suspects, but instead an entire far-reaching system of merciless exploitation and utter corruption.

One man versus The Man-not an uncommon conceit. But most heroes bring down the baddies without breaking a nail or a real sweat. No matter what obstacles were thrown at Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe we never felt any they were in any real danger. Good would triumph. Gittes, by contrast, must stoop to jarring levels of hostility, almost sadism, in order to make headway in his quest for answers. In the film's first act, Gittes conducts a polite interrogation with Evelyn over dinner and cigarettes. By the final act, he's callously slapping her around, infuriated by her constant lack of forthrightness. He goes from covertly taking photos and digging through old record books to thrashing a man half to death against a gate. Watching this decent man snap under pressure gives the film its terrifying pull, reminding us of the reservoirs of evil that lie deep within the hearts of all good people, waiting to be tapped.


Nicholson plays brilliantly on his loose-cannon public image here, presenting us at first with the most restrained, relatable character he's ever created, only to drag him deeper and deeper into the depths of despairing mania. He may not display his psychosis in deranged babble or jittery tics, but we know from the look in his eyes in the film's morbid finale that he's just as broken inside as Randall Patrick McMurphy or The Joker. He's been lied to and manipulated and taken advantage of so much-as have so many of the people he's come to know whilst on the Mulwray case-that he's lost all his faith in the human race, and by extension, his ability to connect with the rest of its members.

Chinatown is an embarrassment of riches. Dunaway deserved an Oscar for making despondency repulsive and seductive all at once, and on the technical side of things, Jerry Goldsmith's score evokes the spare, spit-tobacco pseudo-beauty of the movie's setting, a bone-dry Los Angeles in its days of burning. However, for all its successes, I believe the essentials reasons for the film's considerable achievement are threefold. Two have already been mentioned-Towne's flawless script, Nicholson's knowing performance. The third is Polanski's superfluous direction. His methods are questionable (word is he physically abused Dunaway to draw out her darkest side). His results, however, are not. Having lost his wife to the Manson murders just before shooting began, Polanski truly understood the nature of the metaphysical, almost viral despair Towne was trying to document, and thus captured it perfectly. There is a fearlessness to this movie that floors you. It inspires true, bone-deep horror without a single jump scene or bloodbath. The true monsters, Polanski explains, are us, and isn't that the most terrifying thought of all?

Movies like Chinatown marked a sea change in the moral fabric of the American cinema. As the Golden Age of Hollywood slowly but surely dimmed, movies were shaken out of their Technicolor reverie by the plunge of an economy, the dissolution of a long-prevalent sub-culture, and the death of a president. It was post-Zapruder, post-Altamont, post-My Lai, and the climate of national malaise was so strong it infected even our escapism. We didn't go to our movies for dreams-we went for nightmares.
From the mid-1960's up until the watershed release of the first Star Wars in 1977, theaters were filled with a string of cinematic screeds that viewed a shifting (rotting?) America through a lense of Nietszchean abnegation, and Chinatown was the arguable apotheosis of the genre. Whereas Casablanca and Best Years of Our Lives inspire unchecked pride by showcasing the beauty of human sacrifice, this picture accomplishes the opposite, steeping us in the shameful foibles of our sinful nature and delivering a chilling message that grows more and more prophetic with every schoolyard shooting or suicide bomb, a message best summed up by Evelyn's father (John Huston); "You see...most people never have to face the fact that in the right time and the right place...they are capable of anything."