Jack Nicholson and the film where a dog is flung in the trash
If an actor is going to throw a dog down a garbage chute, it better be Jack Nicholson. A pretty boy doing the throwing would be just vile. Dog in the chute is that classic scene in As Good As It Gets, a film I watched again some months ago. It was still hilarious and as endearing as the previous time. The movie is about a rich cranky writer, Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) and his interactions with two people: his neighbour Simon Bishop (Greg Kinnear), an artist who has a dog named Verdell, and Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt), a waitress at a diner Melvin frequents, who lives with her mother and ailing son. All of them live in New York.
“If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere!” yells an annoyed Melvin one day, as he flings his neighbour Simon’s dog, that poor animal, into the chute. Verdell is sucked by gravity, and lands at the other end, dirtier, whimpering, but alive.
Why that scene is not as horrible and offensive as people tying firecrackers to the tails of mongrels in Mumbai on Diwali, I don’t know. Maybe because this is a movie, and the degrees of cruelty are different. Except… when the hunter kills Bambi’s mother in Disney’s Bambi, I couldn’t take it, and that was fiction too. Anyway.
What is so great about As Good As It Gets? What about the film makes people YouTube certain scenes time and again even when all dialogues and expressions have long been memorised? Do movies really leave us in a better mood? Yep. Does it take Jack Nicholson as Melvin Udall to slap some outrageousness and joy into our dreary lives? You bet.
Usually, I suck at remembering dialogues and punch lines. But in the latter half of the film, there is a line from a date that goes wrong. The guy, who is over at Carol’s place, walks out on Carol when her son needs her saying, “Too much reality for a Friday night”. That stuck with me for years. And it isn’t even the best line in the film. The offhand reference to fresh bread at the end is a better line, and the writers must have known it.
I’m not sure what it is exactly about the film, besides the fact that it just ticks all boxes of my emotional palate, that makes it so re-watchable. Is it, let’s see...
1. Jack? Did I love the movie because of him? Yes, yes. In any movie, Jack Nicholson is a delight. Those mile-high eyebrows, the droopy eyes, the low, sonorous voice, the broad, wicked grin. He makes wickedness so acceptable.
As Melvin, he might have introduced me to OCD behaviour. In As Good As It Gets, he’s neurotic about having things the way he must have them. He’s mad about order and symmetry and neatness. He hops on the sidewalk to the rhythm of the map in his mind. He doesn’t touch people — germs, carries his own plastic cutlery to the diner and so on. I love the movie for the character of Melvin, for his grimaces and his agony and his general disgust with the world.
James L Brooks has also directed Terms of Endearment (1983). Watch the scene where Jack Nicholson’s character, Garrett Breedlove — fabulous character names Brooks gives Nicholson — steers a car on the beach with his feet, and a fuming Shirley McLaine is his co passenger.
2. The writing, the lines. They make the film. Some so famously acerbic, others that pander to a softer side: Melvin Udall: I had to see you. Carol Connelly: Because? Melvin Udall: It relaxes me. And another, from one of my favourite scenes, Simon Bishop says to Helen Hunt’s character: “You’re beautiful, Carol. Your skin, your long neck, the back, the line of you. You’re why caveman chiseled on walls”.
3. The actors, all of them. Take Helen Hunt/ Carol. She’s so non-fussed. A type of person who wouldn’t make heavy weather if a house guest broke an expensive dinner plate. That and her red and white polka dress. Carol, has her priorities sorted. If anyone ever needed a poster girl for ‘polite but firm’, call Carol.
4. The dog. A brown Brussels Griffon named Verdell, who was thrown down the chute and still so guilelessly grew attached to the perpetrator, crank ol’ Melvin. If there is a soundtrack of the movie, it’s the ghunguroo — the tinkering of Verdell’s little collar bell.
5. I like the idea of putting oddballs in unlikely situations and watching what happens, which is the way that Brooks directs his (too few) movies. That road trip Melvin and Carol and Simon go on leads to a change of scenery and to great scenes. The one where Simon sketches Carol — here’s where the line about nape of her neck and cavemen comes in — is beautiful. That interaction does two things: for Simon, it brings his confidence back as an artist. And for Carol, it frees her somewhat, makes her feel appreciated, worthy of being desired. Oh, and it drives Melvin rabid with jealousy, which is great cinema.
6. Propinquity. The idea of physical proximity yielding to an emotional closeness. I like the idea of neighbours who despise each other having to rely on each other.
7. All the characters are full of human frailties. All of them are adults with warped lives but a functional sense of humour. All of them have and shortcomings, all of them go through transformations. The part of me that lingers in the self-help aisle of bookstores and fishes out corny TED talks digs this.
James L. Brooks’s movie and direction won Nicholson and Hunt the Academy Award for Best Actor and Best Actress. They could have tossed that Verdell a bone too.