Title: About Jack
Date: 1/10/2003; Publication:
01-10-2003
Headline: About Jack
Byline: Emanuel Levy
Edition; Magazine
Section: Arts
Page: 16
Friday, January 10, 2003 -- After four decades of acting, Jack Nicholson still
has plenty of surprises in him. In his new movie, a social satire calledAbout Schmidt, he gets very real and plays an
Everyman his own age.
Ever since the film's premiere in
Nicholson signed on for well under his usual $15 million salary. It paid off:
He got the best reviews of his career, and has already won the prestigious
acting award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
An Oscar for Schmidt will make Nicholson the most- celebrated actor in Oscar's
history. With three Academy Awards to his credit and 11 nominations, he'll tie
with Katharine Hepburn, the all-time champion who has earned four Oscars out of
12 nominations.
Nicholson is the first American actor since Marlon Brando
and James Dean in the 1950s to possess the elemental energy and exuberant
personality to capture the American collective consciousness in the
post-Vietnam era. A revolutionary player within the
In 1975, after winning his first Oscar for One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest, Nicholson was declared the finest actor working in American
film. But it was a long, tortuous road to the top for him.
He began his
A cinematic icon for at least three decades, Nicholson has worked with the best
directors in the world: Stanley Kubrick (The
Shining), Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger),
Roman Polanski (Chinatown), Milos Forman (One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest), and John Huston (Prizzi's
Honor).
But Nicholson is also known for his generous support of young filmmakers, such
as his friend Sean Penn, for whom he made two films: Crossing Guards and The
Pledge. And now he's the center of the work of another up-and-coming filmmaker,
Alexander Payne, who previously made two highly acclaimed social satires:
Citizen Ruth, about abortion, and Election (1999), a savagely funny look at
high-school student-council politics that catapulted Reese Witherspoon into the
major league of American comediennes.
NICHOLSON PLAYS Warren Schmidt, an insurance actuary who knows the mathematical
odds on life expectancy but doesn't know his own emotions. He can't connect
with his sweet, slightly bovine wife, and his angry, distanced daughter, about
to marry a man he considers a philistine, a waterbed salesman.
Payne worked on the story by intertwining an old script he had written as a
UCLA student with a novel (of the same title) by Louis Begley.
"He is just a nice Midwestern guy who has played by the rules he was
instructed to play," says Payne. "What interested me was taking
everything away from the man - his career, his marriage, his daughter, his fatherhood - all the institutions that had given him
some semblance of meaning. Without those things, a man is forced to find the
bedrock of who he really is. And maybe at his age it's too late. Maybe he lacks
the necessary tools anyway."
Nicholson has played many regular guys prone to failure. But he's an actor who
knows how to play to an audience, how to get viewers to share in and root for
his flawed characters. Since moviegoers expect little of his roles, he's
capable of doing - and saying - anything. Indeed, he's the kind of actor who
makes the most meticulously written dialogue sound fresh and improvised.
Audiences feel comfortable with him, and that comfort is the key to the
popularity and versatility of the Nicholson screen heroes, or rather
anti-heroes.
Nicholson's specialty has been playing conflicted characters, vulgarians who are vulnerable. His sweet- sadistic
alternating current has kept audiences watching closely for 45 years. He
possesses that cynical smile - the calculated insult that alerts audiences to how
close to the surface his hostility and anti-establishment feeling is.
IN SCHMIDT, Nicholson doesn't use the glinting, funny- malign eyes. He says he
was instructed to get rid of his familiar gestures, avoid his boyish shark's
grin and indulging his wiggling eyebrows. Sporting an utterly different look,
he tones his performance way down. To capture Schmidt's weariness, he keeps his
voice low.
Nicholson has always been good at creating privileged actor's moments, small
explosions of temperament as well as brilliant insights into the characters
he's playing. By now he's become such an expert at fine modulations that he
digs with relish into Schmidt's mix of sonorous patter and good- hearted
grunge.
A sharply observed character study, Schmidt takes the form of a middle-American
road odyssey. At first, Nicholson's Schmidt, a sleepy-eyed, combed-over lump of
a man, looks like a victim of
Nicholson shows effectively and expertly the man's muted agony over his
retirement and the loss of his wife. Veering expertly between the comic and the
tragic, Nicholson makes us wish that Schmidt will find his inner self and raise
the protest he has built inside him.
"You wonder just how far you're willing to go in terms of flop sweat, in
not saying what you mean," the actor says. Indeed, the performance is a
marvelous balancing act: Nicholson takes Schmidt's many human failures and
makes them funny, maddening, sad - and deeply touching.
Nicholson, like his idol, the late Laurence Olivier, can change his physicality
and identity from part to part. Early on, Nicholson found a key element to his
role - "I'm a comb-over," he says.
To play Schmidt, Nicholson quit his perennial watchfulness in the weight
department. He explains: "The role is autobiographical in the sense that
you don't always know what you're doing in life. This guy was a projection of
what my life might have been like. If I had decided to just sit in one place,
this might be what I looked like."
AS THE movie is set in
Though talking with passion about his new film, Nicholson alludes to a certain
depression that settled over him as he shuffled through the role. Harry Gittes, Schmidt's producer and Nicholson's friend, says
"it was not so much about Jack's romantic quandaries as it was other inner
grapplings with age, family, and work."
Director Payne was ambivalent about his star's suffering: "He was bringing
the man to life, and there's nothing more gratifying than to see someone not
just fulfill, but surpass all your expectations. The joy was in not knowing
exactly what you're gonna get."
It's the first time in Nicholson's career that he not only plays a man his age
but also looks that way. It was not easy for a man living in a youth-obsessed
culture. Nicholson claims he stepped into Schmidt's unattractiveness with mixed
feelings.
"It was only rough when I looked in the mirror on the way to work,"
he concedes. "I did feel, 'My God, I'll never recover from that.'"
Though Nicholson scored both critical and commercial success with As Good As It
Gets (1997), which won him his third Oscar, he is mindful of balancing his work
between small, challenging independent films, such as Penn's art- house but uncommercial films and big, mainstream movies.
He explains: "Every once in a while I'll do something slightly more
accessible with broader potential," alluding to films like Terms of
Endearment, Batman, or A Few Good Men.
Hitting the age of 50 (in 1987) was Nicholson's most intimidating experience to
date.
"It's when your real loss of innocence and sense of mortality somehow come
crashing in on you," he says. He was therefore "delighted" when
he turned 51, as he reasons: "Just to get out from under the mystique of
it. We all seem to grapple with it in different ways."
So how does it feel to be 65?
Says Nicholson: "I am happy with my job classification. It's a wonderful
life to have. Every movie company is different. It's a constant
challenge."
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