The Best Picture Countdown #79: The Departed (2006)

Note: this post is modified from a previously published post

Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Vera Farmiga, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin

The Departed is the film that finally (finally!) won Martin Scorsese his long overdue Oscar for Best Director. Despite this, the film sometimes gets mentioned as one of his “lesser” projects – an attitude that I find ludicrous. The level of craft on display in this film belies the notion that this is anything less than a masterwork and to my mind The Departed deserves to be considered alongside Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas as one of Scorsese’s very best. To me, this film was a return to form for the director, whose previous two efforts (Gangs of New York and The Aviator) were bloated just a bit by too much self-indulgence. It is also one of the few films of which I can honestly say that the remake is better than the original.

The Departed begins with Jack Nicholson as mobster Frank Costello and if the opening doesn't remind you of Goodfellas then... you've never seen Goodfellas. However, while Goodfellas begins with the still star-struck narration of the protégée, The Departed begins with the weary narration of the mentor. Frank will take Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) under his wing, grooming him to enter the police force and become his spy. Sullivan thrives, rising quickly through the ranks and passing on information to Frank so that he can stay one step ahead of the authorities.

While Colin is a bad guy pretending to be good, there's also a good guy pretending to be bad: Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is rising in a different fashion as a cop tapped to infiltrate the mob. Years pass as this cat-and-mouse game is played with Costigan supplying information to Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) and Sullivan keeping Costello apprised. Both organizations are aware that there's a leak and both Costigan and Sullivan are on edge, under constant threat that the delicate balance of their lives will tip and leave them exposed and in danger. The plot itself is quite delicate insofar as any element revealed too soon would destroy the tension that's been building, but writer William Monahan manages to maintain the balance, keeping the plot from toppling over on itself and also keeping it from growing too heavy. This is a film with a complex plot and a two and a half hour running time, but it clips along at a great pace and that's as much a credit to Monahan as to director Martin Scorsese or editor Thelma Schoonmaker.

DiCaprio and Damon carry the weight of the film and both are able to convey the desperation both men feel. These two characters are in a sense rudderless, their identities so flexible that even they don't always know who they are, but neither actor ever seems lost behind their masks. The performance by DiCaprio is especially moving as Costigan's knowledge that not only is his false identity under constant threat of exposure but that if something were to happen to Queenan and Dignam, he could lose his "real" identity as well, takes a heavy toll on him both physically and mentally. It's a performance which displays a great deal of vulnerability, which you don't often see or expect in this type of movie.

There are many other reasons to see this movie, from the inter-play between Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin (Wahlberg and anyone, actually), to the performance by Nicholson, to the almost comical way that cops keep turning out to be criminals and criminals keep turning out to be cops. It's a great movie, a genre film in the best sense: one that embraces the conventions of the genre but rises above the cliches.

The Best Picture Countdown #56: Terms of Endearment (1983)

Director: James L. Brooks
Starring: Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson

“I deserve this!” Shirley MacLaine proclaimed when she won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Terms of Endearment. She wasn’t wrong. Playing Aurora Greenway, she renders one of those force of nature performances that just make you sit back in awe. Her performance, and the film itself, sometimes threatens to go over the top and yet both manage to dance right up to the line and then pull back just in time.

Terms of Endearment is a family drama centering on the relationship between a mother, Aurora, and her daughter, Emma (Debra Winger). The relationship is a difficult one, in part because Aurora is a helicopter parent before such a term was invented (there’s an early scene when Aurora practically climbs into Emma’s crib to reassure herself that the child is alive and well). Once grown Emma marries the ridiculously named Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels), with whom she has three children, but the marriage is an unhappy one. Flap is a serial philanderer and Emma eventually has an affair of her own with a man named Sam Burns (John Lithgow). Finally, Emma leaves Flap and takes the children to live with Aurora, but this is only temporary. She goes back to Flap and agrees to move for the sake of his job, discovering later that he's uprooted the family in order to follow his mistress from one university to another.

While Emma is experiencing these upheavals, Aurora begins a relationship with her neighbour, astronaut Garret Breedlove (Jack Nicholson). Their relationship begins with hostility then evolves into hostility slightly tempered by sex (“You’re not fun by any chance, are you?” he asks on their first date), and ends once Emma and her brood move in, when Garrett does some soul searching and decides that he can’t handle Aurora’s baggage. Later Emma is diagnosed with terminal cancer, bringing the family together while also threatening to tear it irrevocably apart due to all the long-simmering tensions between its members.

Written by James L. Brooks and Larry McMurtry and directed by Brooks, Terms of Endearment is one of those films that can comfortably navigate its way from one extreme to another and back again. It is at times an incredibly funny film and at times intensely sad and it is wholly comfortable in both milieus. It touches a chord both with its humour and with pathos, constructing both around relationships that are complex and believable. Just as Aurora and Emma have a complicated relationship, so do Emma and her eldest son, Tommy. There is a scene at the end when a dying Emma tells Tommy, “I know you like me. I know it. For the last year or two you’ve been pretending like you hate me... You’re going to realize that you love me. And maybe you’re going to feel badly because you never told me. But don’t – I know that you love me.” It’s a powerful scene (amazingly played by Winger) that perfectly expresses the sentiments at the heart of the piece: sometimes the people you love inspire the worst in you and you treat them badly because you take them for granted. But, at the core, you do love them and they love you.

As I’ve already mentioned, MacLaine’s performance is great. She alternates easily between cool wit (to Garret after launching him out of his convertible and into the surf: “How are you? It’s not my fault but I’m sorry.”) and scenes of high tension (“Give my daughter the shot!”) and at once makes Aurora a nightmare and a compelling and ultimately rootable and kind of loveable character. Winger, who was also nominated as Best Actress, matches MacLaine step for step. The set of Terms of Endearment was notoriously explosive, with plenty tension between the two leading ladies, but onscreen those tensions channelled themselves into a dynamic that has a great deal of depth and propels the narrative forward. The cast is rounded out by a number of great supporting performances from Daniels and Lithgow as the men in Emma’s life, to Lisa Hart Caroll as Emma’s best friend Patsy, and especially Nicholson as Garret. Garret is one of those quintessentially Nicholson characters with a laid back charm and no shortage of women, but there’s also a sweetness to him that Aurora manages to bring to the surface. At the end of the film he reaches out to Tommy, who throughout the film seems to have absorbed so much of the tension being tossed around by the adults and whose needs have been consistently ignored, and it’s a moment of such easy niceness that even though the scene is profoundly sad (coming as it does at Emma’s funeral), it can also bring a smile to your face. Like the film itself, it strikes that perfect balance between tragedy and joy.

The Best Picture Countdown #48: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Note: this post is modified from a previously published post

Director: Milos Forman
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher

I always tend to think of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest as a comedy and it’s only upon reflection that I remember that it’s actually a drama in which some scenes play as comedy. The deftness with which it mixes comedy and drama is no doubt one of the reasons why it remains so well-loved and why its ending is still so devastating. Given the lighter-hearted moments of screw-you-rebelliousness from Randall McMurphy, the film seems to be moving on a trajectory towards a happier ending, and the fact that it doesn’t makes it all the more powerful.

Randall McMurphy (played marvellously by Jack Nicholson) is a convict faking mental illness in order to serve out his time in a mental hospital rather than prison. The hospital’s administrators are more or less on to him from the beginning, but let him play out his con nevertheless. He and the audience are then introduced to a group of colourful patients and, of course, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). McMurphy spends the rest of the film trying to teach his fellow patients to take charge of their lives and not be blindly submissive to authority, and going head-to-head with Nurse Ratched in one of the great film rivalries.

The comedy comes whenever the patients are all together, but this isn’t a movie that makes fun of mental illness, or that gets laughs at the expense of those who suffer. In its scenes of group therapy, it highlights the absurdity of putting together a group of people with different problems and different needs in terms of handling those problems, and providing all of them with the same treatment. When he arrives McMurphy essentially begins hijacking the therapy sessions in his ever-growing battle with Ratched, but it’s difficult not to be on his side. He’s usually standing up for the others in the face of rules that he believes to be unfair, imposed simply because the staff has the authority to impose them and because the patients are convinced that they have no choice but to accept them. The comedic highlight of the film comes when McMurphy, the only “sane” one, discovers during one of the sessions that he’s the only one actually committed to the hospital; the others are all there voluntarily. It is of course a commentary on larger socio-political issues that those who rebel against the dominant ideology are forced into submission – in McMurphy’s case it is first through confinement, then through drugs, then shock therapy, and finally a lobotomy which leaves him a vegetable – while the masses voluntarily submit to their own oppression and help the power structure remain intact.

Chief Bromden (Will Sampson), the silent giant of the film, represents the fear of the average person in going against the status quo. Assumed to be deaf and dumb by everyone else in the hospital, he eventually speaks to McMurphy, revealing that he, too, sees things for the way they are, but that he lacks the courage to go against it. “My pop was real big. He did like he pleased. That’s why everybody worked on him… I’m not saying they killed him. They just worked on him. The way they’re working on you,” he tells McMurphy. To rebel is to risk standing alone and having the world come down on you with full force. Chief knows this – he’s seen it happen – and so he’s resigned himself from the world, playing along in order to be left alone. But as the film and McMurphy’s schemes progress, he can no longer be content to stand idle, an observer rather than a participator in life. The film’s final and most powerful moments are so profound because McMurphy rebelled and failed, but his spirit inspired the Chief (“Now we can make it Mac; I feel as big as a damned mountain.”), who will succeed.

There are far too many great supporting performances to mention them all (though of all of them, I’ve always thought Sampson as the Chief is the best, expressing so much with so little dialogue), but it’s impossible not to talk about the performances by Nicholson and Fletcher, both of whom won Academy Awards for their performances. Nicholson has a nice, showy role but doesn’t overplay it and it isn’t until the film is over that you really realize how close he kept it from going over the top. Fletcher, too, walks a fine line, playing a character who is evil in the most reasonable of ways, a character who is of the firm conviction that what she’s doing is right, even when it seems cruel (as it does near the end, when it leads to Billy’s suicide). The key to both these characters is that neither one can just walk away from the other; both need to see this through until one is thoroughly defeated. McMurphy has lots of opportunities to escape, but somehow always fails to take them. Ratched has the chance to send McMurphy back to prison, but declines, insisting on keeping him in the institution. Ultimately, these two need each other, they need to fight each other and define themselves by this fight. And with two so finely matched competitors, you can’t help but have a show worth watching.

Ebert's Greats #4: Five Easy Pieces (1970)

* * * *
Director: Bob Rafelson
Starring: Jack Nicholson

Like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson is one of those actors who is both revered for his abilities and chastised for spending the past two or so decades coasting on former glory. It's easy to think of Nicholson as a parody of himself in movies like Anger Management or Something's Gotta Give, but when you see a movie like Five Easy Pieces, you realize that he's more than earned the right to coast.

In Five Easy Pieces Nicholson plays Robert Dupea, easily one of his best and most challenging characters. Born into a family of musicians, Dupea is a skilled classical pianist but works in an oil field. His complicated relationship with his family and what they represent, their legacy, colors many of his actions; to him, family is something that must be escaped. Unfortunately for him, his family is about to get bigger: his girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black) is pregnant.

After finding out that his father has had a stroke, Dupea is talked into returning to the family home and even more reluctantly talked into taking Rayette along with him. Embarrased by how rough around the edges she is, Dupea leaves her in a motel while he returns to the family fold, where he meets his brother's fiancée, Catherine (Susan Anspach). Like him, Catherine is a pianist, and his attraction to her is immediate and reciprocated but their fling is cut short by Rayette's sudden arrival at the house. Dupea is irritated but only until Rayette becomes the subject of ridicule by other people in the house, at which point he becomes her fierce defender and protector. Eventually they leave together, but Dupea's continuing struggle between the intellectual world of his roots and the blue collar world where he's been residing makes it impossible from him to move forward.

Directed by Bob Rafelson and written by Rafelson and Carole Eastman, Five Easy Pieces is a film with a very secure place in pop culture thanks to Dupea's infamous lunch order, but it's so much more than that one scene or line of dialogue. It's a film that rings with authenticity, that draws its characters so solidly it's as if they stepped off the street and onto the screen. Dupea's struggle to belong (and his belief that he can never belong anywhere) is what makes him such a compelling character, a guy you root for even when he disappoints you. Nicholson's performance is masterful, ensuring that Dupea, who essentially adopts whatever persona best suits the company, nevertheless always seems consistent.

The screenplay is very strong, stacking memorable scene on top of memorable scene from beginning to end. The lunch scene is perhaps the best remembered, but the scene in which Dupea comes to Rayett'e defense in front of his family, and a monologue in which Dupea expresses his disappointment in himself to his father, who has been left unable to communicate by his stroke, are incredibly powerful. "I'm trying to imagine your half of this conversation," he tells his father, "My feeling is, if you could talk, we probably wouldn't be talking." His pain, his intensely negative view of himself, is beautifully expressed here and in the film's finale. The last scene (a "great last scene" if ever there was one) is remarkable both for its honesty and its daring and for confirming what we've come to know about Dupea. It's a strong ending to a strong film, one of the best from what is arguably the best decade for film.

Review: The Departed (2006)

* * * *
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson

I need to confess to a bad movie related habit: sometimes it takes me a really (really) long time to get around to seeing a movie that A) I want to see, B) I have every reason to believe I'll like, and C) has been much praised and talked about by others. Part of the reason I started blogging was to break myself of this habit. And so, like Eternal Sunshine... before it, The Departed, is a movie that I've only recently seen, loved and lamented having missed when it first came out.

The Departed begins with Jack Nicholson as mobster Frank Costello and if the openning doesn't remind you of Goodfellas then... you've never seen Goodfellas. However, while Goodfellas begins with the still star-struck narration of the protégée, Departed begins with the weary narration of the mentor. Frank will take Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) under his wing, grooming him to enter the police force and become his spy. Sullivan thrives, rising quickly through the ranks and passing on information to Frank so that he can stay one step ahead of the authorities.

While Colin is a bad guy pretending to be good, there's also a good guy pretending to be bad: Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is rising in a different fashion as a cop tapped to infiltrate the mob. Years pass as this cat-and-mouse game is played with Costigan supplying information to Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) and Sullivan keeping Costello aprised. Both organizations are aware that there's a leak and both Costigan and Sullivan are on edge, under constant threat that the delicate balance of their lives will tip and leave them exposed and in danger. The plot itself is quite delicate insofar as any element revealed too soon would destroy the tension that's been building, but writer William Monahan manages to maintain the balance, keeping the plot from toppling over on itself and also keeping it from growing too heavy. This is a film with a complex plot and a two and a half hour running time, but it clips along at a great pace and that's as much a credit to Monahan as to director Martin Scorsese or editor Thelma Schoonmaker.

DiCaprio and Damon carry the weight of the film and both are able to convery the desperation both men feel. These two characters are in a sense rudderless, their identities so flexible that even they don't always know who they are, but neither actor ever seems lost behind their masks. The performance by DiCaprio is especially moving as Costigan's knowledge that not only is his false identity under constant threat of exposure but that if something were to happen to Queenan and Dignam, he could lose his "real" identity as well, takes a heavy toll on him both physically and mentally. It's a performance which displays a great deal of vulnerability, which you don't often see or expect in this type of movie.

There are many other reasons to see this movie, from the inter-play between Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin (Wahlberg and anyone, actually), to the performance by Nicholson, to the almost comical way that cops keep turning out to be criminals and criminals keep turning out to be cops. It's a great movie, a genre film in the best sense: one that embraces the conventions of the genre but rises above the cliches.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Chinatown (1974)

Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” We never know exactly what Chinatown means to Jake, nor do we need to. By the time the film reaches its conclusion, we know enough to know that Chinatown stands for all that is corrupt, brutal and unforgiving in the world. Chinatown draws upon the archetypes of detective noir in both its literary and film forms but subverts many of the classic tropes, breaking free to create something distinct in itself. Here we have a hero who isn’t quite at home in his rough and tumble world, a femme fatale who isn’t as “fatale” as she seems, and an ending which leaves a distinctly bad taste in the mouth. It was, and remains, something different, something new, and something wonderful.

Jack Nicholson stars as Jake Gittes, a private detective who deals mostly in catching errant husbands and wives in the act. When one such target - Hollis Mulwray - turns up dead and Jake discovers that the woman who hired him, whom he believed to be Mrs. Mulwray, was a fraud, he’s plunged into a mystery involving hidden identities, family secrets, municipal corruption and a plot to make millions by diverting water out of Los Angeles. Ultimately, Chinatown isn’t just one mystery, but several woven together, connected by a few key players. One such player is the real Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), with whom Jake quickly becomes enthralled even as it becomes increasingly obvious that there’s a lot she’s not telling him. By the time she gets to her final confession (“My sister! My daughter!”), it’s easy to understand why Jake doesn’t quite believe her and why he can’t be too sure of anything anymore. It’s Chinatown, a place that’s foreign to Jake’s understanding, where up is down, black is white, and dead men have just bought land that’s about to be worth millions.

Chinatown sets itself apart from traditional detective noir in several ways, most notably through the character of Jake himself. Unlike most screen detectives, Jake doesn’t quite seem to fit his role. There’s a distinct sense about him that he finds his job distasteful, that he doesn’t relish digging around in other people’s dirt. In one scene he’s called to account for some scandalous photos he’s taken and given over to the papers. He jumps up defensively in counter-attack, which is in contrast to detectives of the type you’d see played by Bogart or Mitchum, who would let such a remark roll off their backs with the briefest of witty remarks.

Further distancing Jake from the prototypical detective is the way that he fits into the narrative. By nature of the genre, no screen detective is really in control of the story, but most stories stack the balance of power in the favour of the detective so that you know that, ultimately, the guy is smarter, tougher and luckier than everyone else and will come out of it more or less in tact. Not here. Jake is at the mercy of the story, constantly being knocked around and always in danger. And in the end, there’s no relief for him, no satisfaction for a job well done, no knowledge that justice has been done, no girl, only remorse, bitterness and guilt. Few films are as pitiless to their protagonists as this one, which is perhaps why is seems so fitting that the character who cuts Jake up is played by director Roman Polanski.

Like Jake, Evelyn is a character who breaks free of the archetypes of the genre while also being firmly rooted in that genre. Her entry into the narrative is straight out of the classical story, the femme fatale walking into the detective’s office. But Evelyn is a femme fatale in only the broadest terms because she isn’t actually out to trap Jake or anyone else, but rather her desire is to save someone by ensuring that their identity and whereabouts are kept secret. She’s playing Jake to an extent, keeping him close so that he doesn’t get too close to the truth, but I’ve always thought that her intentions towards him were basically sincere. That she likes him and wants a relationship with him, but has to take care of business first. But his inability to believe that, his inability to take his own advice in the film’s opening scene and “let sleeping dogs lie,” will ultimately undo them both.

As the two leads, Nicholson and Dunaway are superb and play wonderfully off of each other, never quite relaxing in each other’s presence, as if always on edge waiting for the other to slip. Appropriately, given the genre, John Huston appears as Evelyn’s father, a quietly menacing man who informs Jake that "Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” He looms here larger than life, seeming to occupy the entire screen with his presence. When Evelyn shoots him and it has little effect, it’s hardly surprising. He’s more than just a man, he’s a symbol of all that’s corrupt and wrong with society, he’s the epitome of “Chinatown,” and will carry on long after everyone around him as been destroyed.

This fatalist view of the world dominates the film so that this story which takes place in sunny California (with much of the action taking place in the daytime), seems darker than it literally is. The contrast of the mystery/noir elements to the lightness of the mis en scene further emphasises how disordered is this world that we’re seeing. The final scene takes place at night, the setting fitting the darkness of the tone. But by then, of course, we understand: it’s Chinatown.

100 Days, 100 Movies: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Director: Milos Foreman
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher

I always tend to think of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest as a comedy and it’s only upon reflection that I remember that it’s actually a drama in which some scenes play as comedy. The deftness with which it mixes comedy and drama is no doubt one of the reasons why it remains so well-loved and why it’s ending is still so devastating. Given the lighter-hearted moments of screw-you-rebelliousness from Randall McMurphy, the film seems to be moving on a trajectory towards a happier ending, and the fact that it doesn’t makes it all the more powerful.

Randall McMurphy (played marvellously by Jack Nicholson) is a convict faking mental illness in order to serve out his time in a mental hospital rather than prison. The hospital’s administrators are more or less on to him from the beginning, but let him play out his con nonetheless. He and the audience are then introduced to a group of colourful patients and, of course, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). McMurphy spends the rest of the film trying to teach his fellow patients to take charge of their lives and not be blindly submissive to authority, and going head-to-head with Nurse Ratched in one of the great film rivalries.

The comedy comes whenever the patients are all together, but this isn’t a movie that makes fun of mental illness, or that gets laughs at the expense of those who suffer. In its scenes of group therapy, it highlights the absurdity of putting together a group of people with different problems and different needs in terms of handling those problems, and providing all of them with the same treatment. When he arrives, McMurphy essentially begins hijacking the therapy sessions in his ever-growing battle with Ratched, but it’s difficult not to be on his side. He’s usually standing up for the others in the face of rules that he believes to be unfair, imposed simply because the staff has the authority to impose them and because the patients are convinced that they have no choice but to accept them. The comedic highlight of the film comes when McMurphy, the only “sane” one, discovers during one of the sessions that he’s the only one actually committed to the hospital; the others are all there voluntarily. It is of course a commentary on larger socio-political issues that those who rebel against the dominant ideology are forced into submission – in McMurphy’s case it’s first through confinement, then through drugs, then shock therapy, and finally a lobotomy which leaves him a vegetable – while the masses voluntarily submit to their own oppression and help the power structure remain intact.

Chief Bromden (Will Sampson), the silent giant of the film, represents the fear of the average person in going against the status quo. Assumed to be deaf and dumb by everyone else in the hospital, he eventually speaks to McMurphy, revealing that he, too, sees things for the way they are, but that he lacks the courage to go against it. “My pop was real big. He did like he pleased. That’s why everybody worked on him… I’m not saying they killed him. They just worked on him. The way they’re working on you,” he tells McMurphy. To rebel is to risk standing alone and having the world come down on you with full force. Chief knows this – he’s seen it happen – and so he’s resigned himself from the world, playing along in order to be left alone. But as the film and McMurphy’s schemes progress, he can no longer be content to stand idle, an observer rather than a participator in life. The film’s final and most powerful moments are so profound because McMurphy rebelled and failed, but his spirit inspired the Chief (“Now we can make it Mac; I feel as big as a damned mountain.”), who will succeed.

There are far too many great supporting performances to mention them all (though of all of them, I’ve always thought Sampson as the Chief is the best, expressing so much with so little dialogue), but it’s impossible not to talk about the performances by Nicholson and Fletcher, both of whom won Academy Awards for their performances. Nicholson has a nice, showy role but doesn’t overplay it and it isn’t until the film is over that you really realize how close he kept it from going over the top. Fletcher, too, walks a fine line, playing a character who is evil in the most reasonable of ways, a character who is of the firm conviction that what she’s doing is right, even when it seems cruel (as it does near the end, when it leads to Billy’s suicide). The key to both these characters is that neither one can just walk away from the other; both need to see this through until one is thoroughly defeated. McMurphy has lots of opportunities to escape, but somehow always fails to take them. Ratched has the chance to send McMurphy back to prison, but declines, insisting on keeping him in the institution. Ultimately, these two need each other, they need to fight each other and define themselves by this fight. And with two so finely matched competitors, you can’t help but have a show worth watching.