Jack of Hearts
IN HIS NEW FILM, THE KING OF CADS FALLS FOR AN OLDISH WOMAN.
IT'S A FANTASY
By LEV GROSSMAN
Time Magazine
Dec. 8, 2003
Here's the thing about Jack Nicholson: some women really
like him, and other women can't stand him. Fortunately he can tell the
difference: "I know when I got these four or five girls standing around
me, talking to me, and, you know, it's nice--I know the one that flat-out hates
me. You know what I mean? The one that's never gonna like one thing I ever do. And because I know, it
becomes clear to me when I'm going to confront this to my greatest advantage.
So it's always a great delight to me when, in all candor, I can turn to a
person of this nature--who probably hasn't even seen the picture, and already
she doesn't like it--when I can turn to her and say, 'You know, I'm not working
now, so I can be very honest with you: I don't give a f___ what you think!'"
Pause for effect. "This will really galvanize a conversation."
Yes, it will. And here's something else to talk about:
Nicholson's new movie, Something's Gotta Give, is a
chick flick about as unapologetic as they come. Can Jack, the unrepentant
seducer, the legendary monster of appetites, the roguish charmer, turn himself
into the king of hearts? Or put another way, would you buy from this man an
unblushing, sentimental, picnics-on-the-beach romantic comedy about the joys of
committed love?
He still looks good at 66, though his face is fleshier and
squarer and seems on pace to merge completely with his neck sometime around
2008. But it's still a face made for acting--all punctuation marks, from those
pointy circumflex eyebrows to the profound parentheses on either side of his
mouth. Lounging in his favorite suite at a
Nicholson has made a point of defying expectations
lately--his physical transformation into a stoop-shouldered loser retiree in
last year's About Schmidt earned him his 12th Oscar nomination, and a goofball
turn opposite Adam Sandler in Anger Management showed
that he can mix it up with the most sophomoric. But Something's Gotta Give, which opens on Dec. 12, reads like an attempt
to completely dismantle his public persona: he spends the first half of the
movie playing directly to type and the second half dead set against it.
Nicholson plays Harry Sanborn, 63, a rich, unmarried and devilishly charming
Director Nancy Meyers wrote the film with Nicholson in mind.
"I haven't really seen him fall in love onscreen," says Meyers.
"It was that part I wanted to see. I wanted to see Jack Nicholson fall in
love with a middle-aged woman." At first blush, it feels like a piece of
grotesque miscasting. After all, this is a man whose last serious girlfriend
was Lara Flynn Boyle, a woman 33 years his junior. This is a man who has four
children by three actresses, none of whom he is currently married to, and whose
house sits on a hill near Marlon Brando's and Warren
Beatty's. "I kind of squirm under sentiment," Nicholson admits, and
he squirms visibly as he says it. "I've always been kind of a wisecracker
and a deflector."
Granted, yes, it's totally unfair to saddle the character
with the sins of an actor. It's something Nicholson has been dealing with his
whole life--in part, as he's not slow to point out, because of the way his
disarming ease onscreen fools audiences into thinking he's not acting at all.
"It's a double-edged sword," he says. "They always say it's just
like me. Always. And that's the best compliment. It's
the most subtle compliment. When an audience says, 'Oooh,
that's Jack, that's what he's really like,' you don't really want to hear it,
but you've succeeded." Keaton--who has known
Nicholson for more than 20 years, since they worked together in Reds--is more
vehement in his defense. "Philosophically it's very different from many of
the movies that he's been in," she says, "by nature of the fact that
he's dating a woman who is his contemporary, which he may not do in his life,
but who cares about his life? And I hope he has a great one, and if he dates a
25-year-old, it's not my business."
But a movie audience is like an unsequestered
jury: How much can you reasonably expect it to set aside? Harry tells Erica,
"I have never lied to you." Are those words he has ever, in fact,
uttered in real life? The answer is classically Nicholsonian
in its complexity. "I'll tell you the times I've said it," he
explains carefully. "It would be a time, perhaps, when I'm with a serious
girlfriend, at a time when I'm also in a relationship. Right?
And I tell her--I've had this conversation more than once--'Look, I have the
same kind of conflict about dissembling in a relationship that you do. It's not
in the foreground with you, because that doesn't feel right, but don't think
that I don't have this conflict. Therefore, I would never lie to you.' Not an
attractive thing, but it's a very true thing from life." Got that? He's
scrupulously honest--but only with the person he's cheating on somebody else
with.
Yet even his direst critics can't escape the suspicion that
there's an integrity to Nicholson that goes deeper
than his romantic indiscretions. After love, the other grand theme of
Something's Gotta Give is something nobody can lie
about: decrepitude. "I ran pretty good in Adam's movie [Anger
Management]," Nicholson says ruefully, "but I told him before we
started, 'I am a horse, but baby, I don't know if I got more than three or four
sprints before we go to the oxygen tank.'" It's obviously something he's
been thinking about a lot. "My generation is the new old," he goes
on. "We're living longer. If I can't find real models, my idea would be to
inspire that. I don't want to live thinking that everyone in the world thinks
that life is over at 45 years old, because it certainly isn't." Just as
his early hits defined a certain brand of youthful 1970s cool, it may be the
project of his late period to educate youth-obsessed America about how to grow
old in style.
There's a scene in Something's Gotta
Give in which Nicholson appears in a peekaboo
hospital gown, and Meyers lets the camera linger on his exposed and jiggling
66-year-old buttocks longer than is strictly necessary. It's hard to tell a man
who sacrifices so much of his dignity for his art that he has a problem with
honesty. And that seems to be the real point: the more he talks, the clearer it
becomes that Nicholson's only real, passionate, romantic, lifelong love affair
is with acting, and in that relationship, he has never been anything but
totally honest and scrupulously faithful--and if he hadn't been, we would have
felt cheated. Peet says Nicholson still tears his
rapidly thinning hair over not getting an audition for The Graduate--a movie
that came out in 1967, for pity's sake. "He got so emotional when he was
talking about how jealous he was, and it struck me as so odd," she
recalls. "Here's this person that's at the top of his craft--you can't get
more successful than he is--and he acted like this rejection was yesterday. It
made me feel like he's still so in love with what he does." All love
affairs come to an end, however, even faithful ones. Nicholson won't talk about
retiring, but he does give the strong impression of a guy who's not sure where
to go from here. He just made four movies in quick succession, starting with
Sean Penn's The Pledge in 2001, and he has nothing more lined up. "I don't
know if I'll do anything ever again, you know?" he tosses out airily. The
afternoon light has failed, and he's sitting in semidarkness. "That's
where I'm honestly at right now. I'm looking forward to being done because I
worked every day for the past three years."
Nicholson doesn't galvanize quite as many conversations as
he used to. Jack's not as nimble as he once was, or as quick, and his fighting
years are behind him. Who knows? Maybe he's not the rapacious Lothario he once
was--maybe he's starting to go a little soft on us. "I was always more
confrontational than I was tough enough to back it up," he growls.
"You know what I mean? And now I can't back anything up. I definitely have
to endure the distant insult a little bit more than is my nature. But I can't
spend all my time saying nobody likes me. That's just moronic." That's one
of those lessons age has a way of teaching you. Harry Sanborn may not be the
part Nicholson was born to play, but it might just be the one he grew old for.
--With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/
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