As Good As It Gets Director: James L. Brooks Starring: Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding Jr. Approx Running Time: 135 min.
In the film's opening scene, Melvin Udall (Nicholson) grabs a cute little fuzzy dog who looks remarkably like an Ewok on all fours and tosses him down a garbage chute. It was at this point I knew I would love this movie.
Not that I was happy to see the little guy suffer, mind you. As it turns out the dog is fine and he remains throughout the rest of the film. He manages to wiggle his way into your hearts too. But As Good As It Gets has so many things that Hollywood films need these days. It has fantastic dialogue, lines you'll be wanting to remember and use for years, extremely touching moments of sentimentalism, and some brutal emotion. They all blend perfectly.
The only negative I could possibly pin on As Good As It Gets is it's slight edge toward being formulaic....but I won't. It is too good a film to do that.
Simon Udall is a fantastic character, a sort of modern Ebneezer Scrooge. But he is more developed than Srooge ever has been. He is a successful romance novelist who locks himself in his upscale NY appartment and writes constantly. But his quirks are what make him so unique. He is obsessive compulsive. He is also obnoxiously superstitious. But most importantly, he is one nasty, horrid man. Somehow, though, we can't help but love him. Probably because his nastiness is so witty and original. Nicholson was born to play this role, and any other actor would probably have failed to do it with such heart. His performance is as close to perfect as it gets.
Carol Connoly (Helen Hunt) is a waitress at a local restaurant, the only one that Simon chooses to eat at, and she is the only one on the staff who will wait on him. (He brings his own plastic knife and fork each time...you gotta love him.) Hunt really gets a chance to shine in this film. She turns in a marvelous performance because she hits all the marks. She hits every chord at the right time, whether it is silencing a room with her grave sincerity in anger, or crying, or being goofy. She does it all so well. Hunt surely deserves numerous nominations for showing the world that she is more than a sitcom actress. To be honest, as much of a Helen Hunt fan as I was going into it, I am in love with her now. She needs to dump Paul Buchman and move to Hollywood, become an actress.
Greg Kinnear has come a long way from Talk Soup too. He plays Simon's next door neighbor, a gay artist who is badly beaten when he tries to stop a robbery in his own appartment. Kinnear proves his worth as a top notch performer here. He avoids the gay stereotypes that so many straight actors try to include when they play homosexuals, and yet you see his sexuality at all times. It is a very interesting and touching performance, mostly because he, like Helen Hunt, can tell a joke one moment and errupt realistically into violence or emotion the next. To say the very least, As Good As It Gets is filled with memorable performances.
It is pretty easy to see where As Good As It Gets is going throughout. The film turns into a sort of pep talk for being good people, but that doesn't really matter. It is so funny, so emotional and so incredibly well acted that you don't care about that formula stuff. You just want to see what happens next. Absolutely one of this years best films. (Point of interest: Brooks could not decide on a title. For a while, the best he could settle on was "Old Friends". Apparently, the fact that there were no old friends in the film bothered him. He also threw about "Rock Bottom" and "The Bright Side Of Life" which is a song Simon repeatedly played on his piano)
Four Stars
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews