Copyright New York Times Company Feb 7, 1999| [Author Affiliation] |
Jim Shepard, whose most recent novel is ''Nosferatu,'' teaches film and literature at  Williams College. |
TWENTY-FIVE years ago this spring, a worrisomely odd Polish emigre director and a stubborn, slow-working screenwriter teamed up to produce a movie seemingly intended to generate equal amounts of despair and exhilaration. The director, Roman Polanski -- about whom the critic Andrew Sarris remarked that ''his talent is as undeniable as his intentions are dubious'' -- and the screenwriter, Robert Towne, ended up detesting each other. But out of the rancor came ''Chinatown,'' a film noir of vast influence and legendary design (Mr. Towne's script, which at times ran into the high 200 pages without a last act, is pretty much the bible for aspiring screenwriters).
''Chinatown,'' like other notable films from that mini-golden age of American moviemaking -- Sam Peckinpah's ''Wild Bunch,'' Martin Scorsese's ''Mean Streets,'' Bob Fosse's ''Cabaret'' -- was not engaged in demolishing or parodying the genre but in renovating it from the inside by both playing out and interrogating its rules. Accordingly, everything expected is here: Jack Nicholson is J. J. Gittes, the private eye with a past; Faye Dunaway is Evelyn Mulwray, the mystery woman who's all cool control, sexual independence and transparent deception, and they are enmeshed in a satisfyingly labyrinthine plot. (Set in Los Angeles in the 30's, the film is based on an earlier instance of spectacular conspiracy and fraud in which businessmen and politicians caused a drought to divert water from agricultural areas to the city's burgeoning real-estate development.)
Yet ''Chinatown's'' most distinctive feature is the peculiarly understated ferocity of its nihilism, an unusual characteristic in a successful, even much loved film. The villain is Noah Cross (John Huston), Evelyn's father, and his scheme not only suggests the perverse omniverousness of capitalism (water itself is the commodity that's to be hoarded, manipulated and denied); its perversity is also mirrored by the revelation of his quasi-rape of his daughter. Which leaves our mystery woman with a hidden low point in her past that's a few sub-floors below what we had come to expect.
Even so, that would constitute only an extra seamy flourish without the hammer of the ending. In Mr. Towne's original screenplay, Gittes sees his efforts do some good: Evelyn shoots and kills Cross and gets away with their incestuous offspring while Gittes occupies the police. In the version Mr. Polanski filmed, which Mr. Towne referred to afterward as ''the tunnel at the end of the light,'' Evelyn, in trying to escape, is shot through the back of the head. This we discover when Gittes reaches her car and reveals the gaping exit wound through her eye. Noah Cross then wraps his tentacles around his screaming daughter-granddaughter and carries her off, in what has to be one of the more unregenerate moments in American film. What makes it worse is that Evelyn dies not only despite Gittes's best efforts, but because of them: He chose this strategy of escape, and he throws himself heroically across the arm of the good cop who's shooting at Evelyn's tires, which causes the bad cop to aim higher.
''Chinatown'' becomes then the culmination of a film noir trend in which the powers that be are so omnipotent, malevolent and impregnable to decoding that they turn a protagonist's virtues into liabilities. In ''Chinatown,'' the criminals are the system; the municipal projects are named after them. Standing against them is not only futile but also directly harmful. Looking at the body of his lover, Gittes can only murmur what we were told the district attorney had advised his men to accomplish in Chinatown: ''As little as possible.'' Advice that Sam Spade would never have accepted has now become a lesson his descendant learns the hard way.
Protagonists of American action films -- the western, film noir, war -- are all about the individual act as a means of redemption or self-definition. If that's taken away, they have almost nothing left. In ''Chinatown,'' that's taken away. Perhaps no American film ever worked with such cruel ingenuity to show not only the futility but also the catastrophic consequences of good intentions.
The ending has such force because, like Gittes, we never learn; despite all indications, we assume things will not collapse so horribly. Like Gittes, we think we've seen this movie before, and we know how it goes. As we near the climax, he misinterprets a pivotal clue and re-enacts the climax of ''The Maltese Falcon,'' calling the police to turn Evelyn in and then using the pressure of their imminent arrival to demand that she acknowledge his mastery of the puzzle by confessing to his version of events. But he's in over his head. As Noah Cross warned him earlier, ''You may think you know what you're doing, but, believe me, you don't.''
Few films have made such expert use of Mr. Nicholson's persona. His familiar insouciance not only makes for a more appealing private eye whose stature has been radically diminished (Jake's metier, as he pathetically puts it, involves squalid and banal divorce work, and after having his nostril slit by a disconcertingly convincing Mr. Polanski in a cameo, he's forced to spend much of the film wearing a huge nose bandage); it also makes the final nihilism all the more devastating.
As a child Mr. Polanski escaped the liquidation of the Kracow ghetto and lost his mother in a concentration camp, then emigrated only to have his wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child butchered by the Manson family. Given that gothic phantasmagoria of a life he was psychologically well-situated to demonstrate to Americans how deeply romantic a supposedly cynical form like film noir really was.What other American film delivered such sumptuous and glamorous visuals underpinned by such sordidness and corruption? Or exposed such darkness with such gleefulness?
The charitable term for Mr. Polanski's humor is macabre. There are endless visual jokes foreshadowing what will happen to poor Evelyn's left eye: we follow a kicked-out left tail light; view a pair of watches, the left one crushed; everyone's glasses seem to get their left lenses smashed, and before the love scene, Gittes is distracted by ''something black'' in Evelyn's left eye. A flaw in the iris, she explains. Perhaps the nastiest joke involves an early escape staged precisely like Evelyn's attempt at the end: bad guys fire at the car to no effect; then, as the stars drive away unscathed, Evelyn, after a moment, picks delicately at her left eye. (Hmm. There's something in my eye. A bullet?)
HOW perverse is the humor? Well, what should we make of the associations that Mr. Polanski had to know we'd bring to the image of him, of all people, slitting people open with a knife?
All those closet romantics who wish to place ''Chinatown'' safely within the noir tradition that preceded it are fond of reciting what they believe to be the film's final line: Gittes's assistant's ministering and pre-emptively elegaic ''Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown.'' They recognize the familiar appeal of its squint-eyed, tough-guy stoicism. The movie's actual last lines, though, belong to Gittes's friend the good cop. What he shouts, offscreen, as darkness closes in, is a lot less reassuring, and more fitting: ''Get off the street. Get off the street.''
| [Photograph] |
| Jack Nicholson as the private eye J. J. Gittes and Faye Dunaway as the mystery woman Evelyn Mulwray in ''Chinatown.'' (Long Road Productions/Paramount) |
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