Quotes of the Day
Here's the thing about Jack Nicholson: some women really like him, and other women can't stand him. Fortunately he can tell the difference: "I know when I got these four or five girls standing around me, talking to me, and, you know, it's nice — I know the one that flat-out hates me. You know what I mean? The one that's never gonna like one thing I ever do. And because I know, it becomes clear to me when I'm going to confront this to my greatest advantage. So it's always a great delight to me when, in all candor, I can turn to a person of this nature — who probably hasn't even seen the picture, and already she doesn't like it — when I can turn to her and say, 'You know, I'm not working now, so I can be very honest with you: I don't give a f___ what you think!'" Pause for effect. "This will really galvanize a conversation."
Yes, it will. And here's something else to talk about: Nicholson's new movie, Something's Gotta Give, is a chick flick about as unapologetic as they come. Can Jack, the unrepentant seducer, the legendary monster of appetites, the roguish charmer, turn himself into the king of hearts? Or put another way, would you buy from this man an unblushing, sentimental, picnics-on-the-beach romantic comedy about the joys of committed love?
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He still looks good at 66, though his face is fleshier and squarer and seems on pace to merge completely with his neck sometime around 2008. But it's still a face made for actingall punctuation marks, from those pointy circumflex eyebrows to the profound parentheses on either side of his mouth. Lounging in his favorite suite at a New York City hotel, Nicholson sits in an armchair and drinks coffee and smokes Camel Lights. After a weekend of interviews, his lilting, comforting-yet-unnerving voice is shot to the point that it's just a husky growl, but Nicholson is a talker, and when he wants to talk, by God, he's going to talk.
Nicholson has made a point of defying expectations lately — his physical transformation into a stoop-shouldered loser retiree in last year's About Schmidt earned him his 12th Oscar nomination, and a goofball turn opposite Adam Sandler in Anger Management showed that he can mix it up with the most sophomoric. But Something's Gotta Give, which opens on Dec. 12, reads like an attempt to completely dismantle his public persona: he spends the first half of the movie playing directly to type and the second half dead set against it. Nicholson plays Harry Sanborn, 63, a rich, unmarried and devilishly charming Manhattan businessman who dates only women under 30. One weekend Harry scampers off with his girlfriend — played by the lively Amanda Peet (in reality, an over-the-hill 31) — to her mother's beach house, only to keel over with a heart attack as soon as the fun starts. His girlfriend promptly scampers back to the city, leaving him in the care of her divorced mom Erica (Diane Keaton), a tough-minded, successful playwright with no patience whatsoever for Harry and his boyish high jinks. But as the two are forced into each other's company, Harry sheds his lifelong bias against older women and Erica her carefully constructed emotional barriers. It's a December-December romance.
Director Nancy Meyers wrote the film with Nicholson in mind. "I haven't really seen him fall in love onscreen," says Meyers. "It was that part I wanted to see. I wanted to see Jack Nicholson fall in love with a middle-aged woman." At first blush, it feels like a piece of grotesque miscasting. After all, this is a man whose last serious girlfriend was Lara Flynn Boyle, a woman 33 years his junior. This is a man who has four children by three actresses, none of whom he is currently married to, and whose house sits on a hill near Marlon Brando's and Warren Beatty's. "I kind of squirm under sentiment," Nicholson admits, and he squirms visibly as he says it. "I've always been kind of a wisecracker and a deflector."
Granted, yes, it's totally unfair to saddle the character with the sins of an actor. It's something Nicholson has been dealing with his whole life — in part, as he's not slow to point out, because of the way his disarming ease onscreen fools audiences into thinking he's not acting at all. "It's a double-edged sword," he says. "They always say it's just like me. Always. And that's the best compliment. It's the most subtle compliment. When an audience says, 'Oooh, that's Jack, that's what he's really like,' you don't really want to hear it, but you've succeeded." Keaton — who has known Nicholson for more than 20 years, since they worked together in Reds — is more vehement in his defense. "Philosophically it's very different from many of the movies that he's been in," she says, "by nature of the fact that he's dating a woman who is his contemporary, which he may not do in his life, but who cares about his life? And I hope he has a great one, and if he dates a 25-year-old, it's not my business."
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.
- Lev Grossman