Best Actor 1997: Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets

Jack Nicholson received his third Oscar from  his eleventh Oscar nomination for playing Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets.

As Good As It Gets is a pretty bad, with especially cloying direction by James L. Brooks, romcom about a waitress, a curmudgeon and an artist. 

 

Jack Nicholson is a very good actor but I have to say he started to rely on just his natural charisma in his later work, and a lot less on the genuine great actor of his earlier work. As good as it gets is mostly Nicholson doing his Nicholson routine, which works, but it is not exactly brilliant from Nicholson himself.

 

Nicholson starts out the film as a very grumpy individual, who doesn't like anyone and is rude to everyone. I do like how Nicholson handles all of these scenes. Every scene he talks down to someone or the way he avoids touching people on the street but still it just is not anything amazing. His interactions with everyone are good enough, with Kinnear and particularly with Hunt, but he could not sell me on his fear of Cuba Gooding Jr's character. This is fine work from Nicholson for sure here but yet it still is not amazing. Nicholson can do mean well enough, but it feels very much like a setting. What is less impressive is the obsessive compulsive behavior that feels like eccentric acting rather than genuine eccentricity. It doesn't help that the film treats it as such to begin with, but it feels like Nicholson playing OCD rather than this character genuinely dealing with it.

 

Later though Nicholson changes, and has the line of becoming a better man. As much as I do like his chemistry with Hunt, I do not think the script or Nicholson's performance earn the change. It is not so sudden that it feels completely artificial but rather forced a bit too much. His change with the relationship with her is only slightly off, my bigger problem comes from his relationship with Kinnear. His character just despises the guy and then their last scene he says basically how much he cares for him. That is not earned in the least, and I was completely artificial, and extremely forced. Nicholson doesn't reveal genuine changes. Rather Nicholson just kind of plays "Mean Jack" to "affable Jack" with the switch being just what the script requires rather than this gradual change. It feels very much like a screenwriters character, which all characters in films are that aren't documentaries, but you need to be more than a series of overt characteristics. That is what Melvin is here, and in many ways feels like what Nicholson would've done if he had ever lead a sitcom. This being this call on choices for moments of "earnest" heart or jokes involving him being grumpy I guess.

 

The performance isn't a bad performance in that you can easily see the appeal of Nicholson here in general. The man obviously has charisma and that comes to play here. It also though is him very much falling upon that charisma without any real depth to the performance. He plays moments well enough, but every moment that he plays well enough is with this kind of just different "settings" needed. It never becomes this natural realization of an obsessive compulsive losing his hatred to find love. That could be something, isn't helped by the film that does treat it as a sitcomish arc for the pilot episode. It becomes basically a series of one liners from Nicholson, which he can certainly delivery, with the occasional scene for the sitcom audience to go "awww". There isn't exactly the right cohesion or any reality. Which could be fine if it picked a lane of being more overtly comic or more genuine, but instead it wants an artificial tone. Nicholson can play through that tone, but in turn it feels like somewhat artificial work from Nicholson. It's not a terrible performance, but it reveals so much of what is frustrating with many of his later career performances.