As Good as It Gets
With Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding Jr., Skeet Ulrich, Shirley Knight, Yeardley Smith, Lupe Ontiveros, Jesse James, and Jill.
Any synopsis of As Good as It Gets is likely to make the movie seem like a shameless soap opera combined with an abrasive comedy, and any proper account of its style and metaphysics has to include the fantasy world we associate with musicals. But it’s the danger as well as the promise of all these emotional registers that are finally communicated; I often felt like I was walking on a tightrope with Brooks and his actors.
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One of the reasons Brooks’s fourth feature excites me so much is that it clarifies what I find so special about Broadcast News (which opened here ten Christmases ago) and I’ll Do Anything. This generally involves the pathos and comedy of superneurotics struggling to cope with other people in the everyday world, which includes on occasion the bonds between them and other superneurotics. I’m thinking in particular of Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks in Broadcast News and of Nick Nolte and Albert Brooks in I’ll Do Anything, but also of the less neurotic types they often struggle to relate to: William Hurt in Broadcast News and Joely Richardson and Julie Kavner in I’ll Do Anything. It hasn’t always been easy to separate Brooks’s talent in this department from the specific energies of his actors. One moment I’ve always treasured from Broadcast News relates to the siblinglike complicity and intimacy between the characters played by Brooks and Hunter, when he says to her on the phone, “OK–I’ll meet you at the place of the thing where they met that time,” a line that for all I know was contributed by Albert.
The short-term narrative units of sitcoms require characters to exhibit all of their most important traits in self-contained, hyperbolic bursts between commercial breaks rather than allow them to gradually unfold. The fact that these characters can assume mythic weight over weeks or years has more to do with the familiarity and persistence of those traits than with their expansion. This doesn’t mean that surprising revelations or developments are impossible in sitcoms, only that they’re seriously limited because they must conform to the characters’ mythic familiarity before they can perform any other function. (Comic strip characters are sometimes freer because they can persist longer: over decades Li’l Abner can eventually marry Daisy Mae and have a son while still remaining Li’l Abner, but Ralph Kramden having a child–or getting a job other than bus driving–seems inimical to The Honeymooners.) Consequently, there’s a profound conservatism inherent in the world sitcom characters inhabit, where character flaws can never be overcome because this would upset the market for these characters as they already exist.
Taken as complex individuals unfolding and developing over 138 minutes, Melvin, Carol, and Simon are freakish, hyperbolic collections of traits that arguably never quite add up to coherent or believable individuals. But they’re never quite satisfying as sitcom perennials either, if only because they all show marked capacities for change. Yet moment to moment their interactions are terrifyingly, beautifully, and comically real–even if they’re often “real” as distinct from “realistic” in the way that some of the best musical comedies are. Intimately concerned with the embarrassment and difficulty of constant repositioning and mutual readjustments and with all the ethical issues that arise from this activity–the same sort of issues that abound in the films of Leo McCarey (such as My Son John and An Affair to Remember) and Vincente Minnelli (such as The Cobweb and The Band Wagon)–these interactions are the mother lode that all of Brooks’s features have been searching for. Starting and ending with dubious premises, Brooks and his collaborators apparently kept working with the materials at hand until they finally arrived at some sort of bedrock truth.
If Carol and Melvin appear to exist for us only in the present, this is at least partly a result of their sitcom heritage. Within the first few minutes of the movie it’s quickly established that Melvin is both homophobic and racist, but these facts are offered less as character traits–though they eventually function as such–than as curveballs to be caught or fumbled by the audience. (Apart from his dislike of the dog Verdell, these are virtually the first facts established about him, which immediately establishes our uncertainty about him.) We also learn that Melvin’s a romantic novelist who’s on the verge of completing his 62nd book and who recites his prose while punching it out on a word processor–none of which I find especially easy to swallow. It’s typical of Brooks’s method that his characters tend to become detached from their professions; one might even have problems accepting that Nolte is an actor in I’ll Do Anything. Simon, who’s supposed to be a painter in a garret, might as well be Gene Kelly in An American in Paris–a notion that’s planted when Simon plays some of the Gershwin suite on his stereo–while Melvin noodling on his piano next door becomes a clear stand-in for Oscar Levant.
