Perhaps you've heard some of the buzz about the film As Good As It Gets. The movie garnered critical acclaim and won three Golden Globes for Best Actor, Actress, and Best Picture in the musical/comedy genre. Its stars also took home Best Actor and Actress Oscar awards, and the film itself received several nominations in 1997, including for Best Picture. Well, this film is worth all the hype. As Good As It Gets was the best movie I saw in all of 1997, and it was a definite shoo-in for an Oscar sweep.
Director James L. Brooks, himself an Oscar winner for the film Terms of Endearment, pulls together an extremely well-written and very amusing script by Mark Andrus and some of the most talented actors in the business to produce a truly heartwarming film. With Jack Nicholson, who won his third Oscar for this film, leading the cast, it was destined for success.
The plot centers on Nicholson's character, a hack romance author named Melvin. Melvin suffers from an obsessive/compulsive disorder and is in general a very disagreeable person. Everything has to go by his routine or he becomes irate. He is rude toward everyone he comes into contact with, including his neighbor, a homosexual artist named Simon, played by Greg Kinnear. From the opening scene in which Melvin shoves Simon's dog Vernell down a garbage chute in their apartment building, Nicholson portrays Melvin as a truly selfish man. Instantly his character is shown in a negative light and it becomes easy for the audience to hate him.
By beginning with the character having such a grating personality, it is easy for Melvin to grow more human in the eyes of the audience throughout the course of the film. When Simon is beaten and his apartment robbed by a street hustler posing for a painting, Melvin is forced to take care of Simon's dog Vernell, and slowly we begin to see a caring side of Melvin come out. At the same time, Melvin begins to fall in love with Carol, a young waitress played by Helen Hunt. She works in the restaurant where Melvin goes for lunch every day, and she is the only one who will put up with Melvin's quirks.
After an incident at the restaurant where Melvin insults Carol's extremely asthmatic son Spencer, Carol quits and Melvin is forced to break from his routine in order to get her to come back to work. Melvin offers to pay for Spencer to have a personal physician just so that Carol will go back to working at the restaurant. Carol soon begins to realize that Melvin can actually be a pleasant person. She soon begins to care for him as well.
Eventually Melvin must make a road trip to Minneapolis with Simon, who is going to ask his parents who he has not seen in years for money to pay his bills. Melvin invites Carol to come along too, and over the course of the trip, the three of them start to bond.
Melvin begins to see past Simon's homosexuality to consider him a friend. Carol realizes that Melvin is not mean-spirited; instead he has problems expressing his feelings in a normal way. And Simon, through the friendship he forms with Carol, finds his artistic inspiration again.
The thing that drives this film is its high quality of character development. These actors truly become their characters. Each one brings out a depth of emotions in their characters that causes the viewer to get wrapped up in their lives. By the end of the movie, they have become real to us.
Nicholson pulls off his greatest performance this decade, if not of his whole career. But most surprising is Greg Kinnear's performance, which earned him a nomination (but unfortunately not the actual Oscar) for Best Supporting Actor. In this part he is given the freedom to do acting that transcends what he has done in his past work, Sabrina and Dear God. Kinnear truly rises to the challenges the role presents him, and in my opinion he truly steals the show.
Even the very minor characters in this film have scene-stealing roles. Yeardley Smith and Cuba Gooding Jr. both play Simon's friends and every scene they are in is a delight. Yeardley Smith has very few lines but manages to make her character one of the highlights of the film. She manages to be a friend sympathetic to Simon's plight but also strong and unyielding when it comes to paying his bills. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Simon's art dealer Frank. When the robbery takes place, he sort of turns his back on Simon by telling Simon he can not take him to borrow money from his parents. His betrayal of Simon once Simon has no money shows the sleaziness inherent within his character.
Skeet Ulrich of Scream fame plays a very small role as the street hustler Vincent who robs Simon, and Harold Ramis has an extremely tiny part as the doctor who is placed on call for Spencer. Each one of these actors works wonders within the confines of what little the script gives them, leaving you wishing they had been in the film much longer.
That is one of the beautiful things about the script for this film; it allows room for character insight even with the smallest of characters. Each person in the film is well-rounded and is more than a simple walk-on part. The plot of the film may be a bit formulaic at times, but the way the characters are crafted through dialogue more than makes up for this fact.
If the film has any flaws, it is merely the lack of a strong visual dynamic to set the mood. The setting for the majority of the film is New York City, which does not lend itself to much beautiful scenery. Many of ths hots in the film are more standard ad common than in, say, Titanic, which could explain why James L. Brooks was passed over this year for a Best Director nomination. And in a year dominated by that unsinkable blockbuster, it was easy to overlook such a small film as As Good As It Gets due to its lack of cinematic vision.
Still, in my opinion, solely on the basis of Kinnear, Nicholson and Hunt's solid performances, As Good As It Gets beats out Titanic, Good Will Hunting, and any other film that comes to mind for sheer brilliance of character. As Good As It Gets deserved the Oscars it received, and then some, and it deserves your movie dollar. See this film; you will laugh as well as cry. You will end up feeling good and as if your money was well-spent.
