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As Good As It Gets (1997)
Full IMDb listing

After I see "As Good As It Gets," I feel like a real dope, a textbook gold-plated paltroon with epaulets, sash and ceremonial sword. I feel like one of those hicks who makes his first visit to the city and loses $200 at three-card monte before it occurs to him that maybe those three other fellers who seemed to be winning all the time were, you know, working with the dealer or something. I see "As Good As It Gets" and ten minutes later I'm looking for the next bus back to Dogpatch. Because dammit, if back in the theater I really did believe it was a good movie, then that's where I belong.

On the surface, it's potentially a rather unique tale of three people dealing with the misery of their lives. Helen Hunt is Carol, a waitress whose life is miserable due to the simple unfortunate mechanics of its reality. She's a single parent living with her mother, trying to keep her severely asthmatic son healthy with her HMO's medical coverage and her waitressing tips, both of which are sorely inadequate. There's Simon, a successful gallery artist who had misery suddenly thrust upon him by one single event. He's been in a position of peace and happiness far too long to have picked up any of the skills necessary to deal with sudden depression.

And then there's Jack Nicholson. I mean, Melvin. He's the author of dozens and dozens of novels — the sort of sappy romance novels that cause women's heartstrings to resonate so reliably that the things actually get published in hardcover first.

(Now that I think of it, he writes the same kind of books that James Caan's character wrote in "Misery." Picture Jack Nicholson tied to a rusty metal bed and playing a mental and verbal game of cat-and-mouse with a sledgehammer-wielding Kathy Bates. You're starting this sentence a full minute after chewing over the previous one, aren't you? Well, unfortunately, we're still stuck with "As Good As It Gets," so I suppose we should both just get back to it.)

Melvin's rich, he's famous, he's beloved by millions of readers, but he's also miserable...and unlike Carol and Simon, his misery is self-inflicted. Oh, he's been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder — the door must be locked and unlocked five times, the medicine cabinet is filled with dozens of bars of Neutragena, each of which must be used exactly once and then thrown away, etc. — but one gets the impression that this is something his brain has set up to protect him from the repercussions of going around acting like an abrasive and insensitive bastard.

Fans of Jack Nicholson will be tempted to see this film as an unnamed sequel to "Five Easy Pieces." In 1970, Jack was Robert Dupea, a youngish man much injured by life and full of pain. When he snidely urged a waitress to hold the contents of a chicken sandwich between her knees, it was mostly out of self-defense, to maintain his bravado and elevate a fragile self-image by tearing down those of the people around him. When Jack insults waitresses (and their customers) in "As Good As It Gets," it's clear that he's been doing this for over thirty years now and at this point, he simply knows no other way of dealing with people. The OCD seems like a defense mechanism to protect him from his defense mechanism.

All told, we've got some pretty hot stuff here. I do think Holding A Mirror Up To The Human Condition is a task best left to Jerry Lewis (he fails, but the burning wreckage is always good for a laugh). Nonetheless, when a filmmaker begins with the idea of looking at depression from three different angles, he's got fertile ground to work...and wow, the director here is James "Broadcast News," "Say Anything" Brooks, so you know he's capable of knocking a human-relationship tale like this right out of the park.

And sure, I liked this movie. In the theater. But that feeling didn't last; by the time I got back home, I felt like a sucker. The more I thought about "As Good As It Gets," the more I realized that it's just a collection of the most exasperating Big Studio plot cliches and contrivances, held together by some clever lines. As in "Five Easy Pieces," Jack falls for a waitress. The chief difference being the two characters is that in "As Good As It Gets," Jack's now about thirty years too old to be chasing after a woman that age.

Melvin loves Carol. The highly empathic Carol regards Melvin with a mixture of distaste, curiosity and pity. Simon lives across the hall from Melvin. Three people, all with emotional traumas. If left to their own devices, they'd probably work out their problems on their own, over the course of months. Fortunately, clear step-by-step plans for the Group Cathartic Road Trip In A Cool Car are right there on Page 18 of the Hollywood Playbook. Simon has to be gay: this is the only way a big-studio film can toss another male character in the group without running the risk that Carol will wind up being attracted to someone her own age. We can't have the spectre of Carol's son's life-threatening condition hovering over an otherwise feel-good ending, so it's time for Carol to encounter a doctor who happens to be non-incompetent.

And Melvin's gruff exterior is cracked by a Tiny Adorable Mutant Dog (tm). How...television.

The worst concession of them all is the fact that by the end of the movie, Melvin and Carol are a couple. If you regard that last sentence as a major plot spoiler, then all I can say is that if you'd come to me before seeing your first movie ever ever ever, I might have steered you away from "As Good As It Gets" and toward, say, the better of the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise outings.

It cannot possibly work out between Melvin and Carol. It's more than the age thing: it's everything we've come to learn about both characters in the past two hours. It so completely totally cannot possibly work out between them that in the final scenes, you're bracing yourself for the part where they acknowledge that their relationship can't possibly work out, and you're shocked when it doesn't arrive. I mean, if this were a Disney film, a flock of cute big-eyed robins would alight in the trees over Melvin and Carol's heads at this point and unfurl a banner made out of daisies and buttercups which reads "This Relationship Will Inevitably End In A Precedent-Setting Legal Action." And yet, the movie's final shot is of the two of them walking hand-in-hand down a wetted-down city street at dawn.

Ugh. That's not applause I hear as the end-credits roll. It's the sound, from months in the past, of two dozen clipboards being nervously snapped by movie executives as they tally up the results of this movie's thirtieth focus-group screening. They probably added the little dog to the movie after number 26, and are now batting around the around the idea of boosting the film's 18-to-32 demographic by giving Melvin's apartment building a wisecracking, Rollerblading 22-year-old mailman whose misdelivered letters pave the way for a series of cute misunderstandings among the lead characters as well as a wicked pissah stunt piece down the building's spiral stairwell. I repeat: Ugh.

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© 2000 Andy Ihnatko. May not be redistributed without permission. Studio PR types wishing to send Andy tapes, promotional clothing, or high-end video gear in hopes of securing a positive review are advised that such efforts are futile, but they're free to try to determine how high Andy's price actually is. Mail any and all pelft to Box 279, Norwood, MA 02062. He could use a new subwoofer for his home-theater setup.

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