Jack of Hearts

SONY PICTURES
Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in a scene from Something's Gotta Give

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But a movie audience is like an unsequestered jury: How much can you reasonably expect it to set aside? Harry tells Erica, "I have never lied to you." Are those words he has ever, in fact, uttered in real life? The answer is classically Nicholsonian in its complexity. "I'll tell you the times I've said it," he explains carefully. "It would be a time, perhaps, when I'm with a serious girlfriend, at a time when I'm also in a relationship. Right? And I tell her I've had this conversation more than once 'Look, I have the same kind of conflict about dissembling in a relationship that you do. It's not in the foreground with you, because that doesn't feel right, but don't think that I don't have this conflict. Therefore, I would never lie to you.' Not an attractive thing, but it's a very true thing from life." Got that? He's scrupulously honest but only with the person he's cheating on somebody else with.

Yet even his direst critics can't escape the suspicion that there's an integrity to Nicholson that goes deeper than his romantic indiscretions. After love, the other grand theme of Something's Gotta Give is something nobody can lie about: decrepitude. "I ran pretty good in Adam's movie [Anger Management]," Nicholson says ruefully, "but I told him before we started, 'I am a horse, but baby, I don't know if I got more than three or four sprints before we go to the oxygen tank.'" It's obviously something he's been thinking about a lot. "My generation is the new old," he goes on. "We're living longer. If I can't find real models, my idea would be to inspire that. I don't want to live thinking that everyone in the world thinks that life is over at 45 years old, because it certainly isn't." Just as his early hits defined a certain brand of youthful 1970s cool, it may be the project of his late period to educate youth-obsessed America about how to grow old in style.

There's a scene in Something's Gotta Give in which Nicholson appears in a peekaboo hospital gown, and Meyers lets the camera linger on his exposed and jiggling 66-year-old buttocks longer than is strictly necessary. It's hard to tell a man who sacrifices so much of his dignity for his art that he has a problem with honesty. And that seems to be the real point: the more he talks, the clearer it becomes that Nicholson's only real, passionate, romantic, lifelong love affair is with acting, and in that relationship, he has never been anything but totally honest and scrupulously faithful and if he hadn't been, we would have felt cheated. Peet says Nicholson still tears his rapidly thinning hair over not getting an audition for The Graduate a movie that came out in 1967, for pity's sake. "He got so emotional when he was talking about how jealous he was, and it struck me as so odd," she recalls. "Here's this person that's at the top of his craftyou can't get more successful than he isand he acted like this rejection was yesterday. It made me feel like he's still so in love with what he does."

All love affairs come to an end, however, even faithful ones. Nicholson won't talk about retiring, but he does give the strong impression of a guy who's not sure where to go from here. He just made four movies in quick succession, starting with Sean Penn's The Pledge in 2001, and he has nothing more lined up. "I don't know if I'll do anything ever again, you know?" he tosses out airily. The afternoon light has failed, and he's sitting in semidarkness. "That's where I'm honestly at right now. I'm looking forward to being done because I worked every day for the past three years."

Nicholson doesn't galvanize quite as many conversations as he used to. Jack's not as nimble as he once was, or as quick, and his fighting years are behind him. Who knows? Maybe he's not the rapacious Lothario he once was maybe he's starting to go a little soft on us. "I was always more confrontational than I was tough enough to back it up," he growls. "You know what I mean? And now I can't back anything up. I definitely have to endure the distant insult a little bit more than is my nature. But I can't spend all my time saying nobody likes me. That's just moronic." That's one of those lessons age has a way of teaching you. Harry Sanborn may not be the part Nicholson was born to play, but it might just be the one he grew old for.