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?
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 acting--all 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.