As Good as It Gets contains the ingredients of a nice story about three very different people findin

As Good as It Gets contains the ingredients of a nice story about three very different people finding friendship and mutual support in trying circumstances. What it does not contain the ingredients for is two of those people falling in love. It puts a cake batter in the oven and pulls out a beef wellington at the end. Every time the film tips into overt romanticism, it abruptly curdles. Was there some earlier, better draft onto which a romance was hastily grafted?Helene: ‘Emotional Labour, The Movie’.Melvin says deeply offensive, racist things about the Simon’s black agent in the film’s opening scenes. Immediately afterward we see his extensive jazz collection shelved beneath a painting of two black jazz musicians, and are made to understand that the things he says to offend people are not necessarily the things that he truly feels. This is mostly likely so that when he is nasty to the waitress later, we understand on some level that it isn’t meant, and can later forgive him. It’s a tricky line to walk, and is only occasionally walked successfully.I found depictions of misanthropic, offensive loudmouths more amusing in my youth than I do now, but I still do find them quite amusing.I recommended we watch this to Helene (or at least said: ‘I think this is good. As far as I remember it’s pretty entertaining’). What I found was that my brain has excised most of the romance. I remembered, for example, Melvin’s famous line: ‘You make me want to be a better man,’ but had completely forgotten they actually kiss after it. In the version I remembered the romance is ambiguous, unspoken, and Melvin and Carol walk to the bakery in the middle of the night and talk about their vulnerabilities and their deepening relationship, and there it ends, somehow, open to interpretation. Of course they don’t. They have a big cheesy kiss on the street, which my brain had entirely removed.  Helen Hunt’s performance is wonderful. Her head-on management of Melvin in the restaurant is the charming centre of the film. Her joy at the private doctor’s arrival is giddy and lovely.I still can’t believe they both won an Oscar. Both of them!One must extend empathy to all three characters to find any enjoyment in the film. Melvin’s naked fear and vulnerability are not unaffecting. I am moved by his plight. Others might not be.Can you think of any film about artists in which the art portrayed is not really terrible?The reveal that Melvin has for the first time begun to take his medication throws an interesting light on his burgeoning relationships. Is there anything particularly healing about Carol and the dog, or is his improvement largely down to the meds? The film’s arc seems to suggest a redemption through human connection, but it hints also at a redemption through pills.Helene is infuriated that Melvin’s “compliments” to Carol, which are the core fulcrums of the film, and given time and space and sappy emotional music, are all about himself, his feelings and his changes in response to her. She is another mirror in which he sees himself. I prefer to think of this as true to his damaged self. A knowing, honest representation of character. I am happy that these are what Melvin thinks are compliments. I am NOT happy that they actually work.Zimmer’s soundtrack is terrible, cloying and sentimental, undermining the better qualities of the film.I think, watching this film in my late teens, that the difference in age between Melvin and Carol was not so apparent. Helen Hunt always seemed older than her years to me. Looking up the actress’s age I am surprised to find her younger, in this role, than I am now. Jack Nicholson looks old, so old, and I want, for the sake of the film, to imagine that she is older, and he just looks older. But in fact it’s the opposite: she looks older, and he is old, and in fact 26 years separates the two actors, and it’s grotesque. Grotesque that it’s never addressed, that we must accept this for her without acknowledgement.The character of Frank Sachs (Simon’s agent) is strangely truncated. He serves a useful role in physically threatening Melvin out of his stasis, but is otherwise absent from any of Simon’s formative moments. He seems to be a close friend but also a distracted agent, who then disappears before the third act and is never seen again. Is he there to illustrate the limits of friendship?Simon and Carol are so obviously the kind of people who could be good friends that, by the time they are finally put in the same place halfway through the film, it is a cheerful and pleasant relief to watch them love one another instantly. The film is interestingly constructed in this regard—I can’t think of many other stories that keep two platonically linked characters separate for so long, developing them separately so that their eventual connection feels so easy and true.The film, in its final act, seems to be assembling itself into the pilot of an odd-couple sitcom. An OCD grump and a gay artist living in one huge New York apartment, with frequent call-ins from their sharp-witted waitress friend and the street smart, cellphone-wielding agent. It could have run on for a decade like this, in half-hour weeklies.Each character truly has something the other needs, and it is almost navigated successfully, and without imbalance. Carol and Simon have problems that only money can solve, and Melvin has problems only people can solve. The various debts entered into are coherent and meaningful. Melvin needs Carol, for now, to be his waitress. Helping her son is a small price to pay for the stability he craves. He doesn’t need her to sleep with him, and when she shouts that she never will it seems, in the moment, brutally cruel. But then the romance that follows destroys all these intricate balances, and renders everything—most especially Melvin’s financial aid—icky and disturbing. Here the film ends.It’s inexplicable, really. It’s so openly evident that Carol can and should do better, that she has something healthier available to her than this, that Melvin has nothing to offer her, certainly not yet, that every time we are reminded that something actually romantic is happening between the two of them we are yanked violently out of the film. ‘Why can’t I have a normal boyfriend?’ she shouts at the sky. Yes. Why can’t she? -- source link
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