Cinema
As Good As It Gets (15, selected cinemas)
That Nicholson charm
Mark Steyn
James Brooks's As Good As It Gets is a tough-love, off-kilter romantic comedy about an obsessive-compulsive (Jack Nicholson), a put-upon waitress (Helen Hunt), a gay neighbour (Greg Kinnear) and a dog. If the shorthand sounds a bit glib, you should hear Nicholson: 'Carol the waitress, meet Simon the fag.' As Melvin, insulting and alienating everyone he meets, Nicholson crackles with more energy than he's shown in a decade. He is, of all things, a romantic novelist, cranking out idealised love stories he's got no time for in his own life. On a visit to his publisher, the star- struck receptionist accosts him and tells him how uncanny it is that he seems to know everything that's going on inside her. How is he able to write female characters so well? Easy, he says; he just writes male characters and then eliminates reason and judgment. In fact, his only point of human contact, male or female, is with Carol, whose restaurant he visits every day, though he takes the precaution of bringing his own plastic utensils. Shanghaied into driving the gay guy to Baltimore, Melvin talks Carol into coming along, just in case Simon the fag 'pulls the stiff one-eye' on him. Miss Hunt does a much better job than she did in Twister, almost succeeding in looking as bedraggled and haggard as Nicholson says she does. If I bring up Carol's sick kid, don't be put off. Nicholson is sly and mali- cious enough to hold his own even in the most potentially mawkish scenes. For most of the last few years, from the Joker in Bat- man to the howling lead of Wolf, Nicholson has been in danger of deteriorating into a cartoon of his former self — all sex, smiles and cockiness. It takes a dorky loser-weirdo like Melvin to enable the real Nicholson charm to come through.
Besides, even an ailing moppet shouldn't blind us to how unusual this film is for a mainstream comedy. All three principals are failures and the laughs they wring from it are sharper than we've come to expect
from this genre. That's the challenge Brooks has set himself: a romantic 'comedy is supposed to be as light as a soufflé, but can you do that with a character deter- mined to puncture it whenever it starts to rise? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. As Good As It Gets is just that.
Lloyd Bridges, who died last week at 85, was one of those actors who could make almost anything watchable. Take Rocket Ship X-M (1950), which I stumbled across at two in the morning on television years ago. The eponymous rocket has been blown off course and is heading for a colli- sion with Mars, but fortunately for all con- cerned Bridges is there — tall, blond, craggy, dependable. The plot was written on the back of an envelope in ten minutes and is full of holes, but Bridges somehow imbues it with tremendous dignity — nobil- ity even. He once said he could play Ham- let better than Richard Burton and Othello better than Jose Ferrer, and he was proba- bly right. But by then Hollywood had other uses for him. He was Gary Cooper's deputy in High Noon, refusing to come to his aid because he felt the sheriff's job should have gone to him — a great supporting part in which, unusually, Bridges got a shot at pro- jecting moral weakness.
After that, it was on to the television show Sea Hunt, where, despite the best efforts of underwater assault teams, killer sharks and exploding submarines, Bridges would always emerge triumphantly from the ocean — lean, tanned and completely unscathed. Like Leslie Neilsen, he spent the best part of his career playing solid straight-shooters in formula adventures and cop shows and then simply transferred the technique to comedy, recycling many of the same lines, too. 'Guess I picked the wrong week to quit smoking,' he muttered, lighting up as the harassed air-traffic con- trol trouble-shooter in the Zucker brothers spoof Airplane. Ten minutes later, the situ- ation had not improved: 'Guess I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue,' he muttered, sticking his head in a bag of sol- vents and sliding under the desk. In the Top Gun parody Hot Shots, he was the commanding officer giving his boys a pep talk on the eve of their mission: 'When I see a fine body of men like you, what I wouldn't give to be 20 years younger. And a woman.'
The Zuckers and Jim Abrahams will miss Bridges: their kind of scattershot comedy only works with guys who've spent years doing the same roles for real — and both Bridges and Neilsen proved to be their own best parodies. Even in his eighties, Bridges was more or less unchanged — still tall, still fit, just craggier. Aside from his work, he also bequeathed Hollywood his sons Jeff Bridges, one of the half-dozen best film actors around today, and his pudgier brother Beau, one of the most underrated.
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