As Good as It Gets

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by John Simon

James L. Brooks is a producer/ director/writer out of television who knows exactly how to make crowds laugh or cry or, better yet, do both at once. He has not always been successful, but with films such as Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News the great manipulator proved his mettle. He does it again with As Good as It Gets.

This is a comedy about Melvin Udall, a writer of popular romances, an obsessive-compulsive, and a total misanthrope. He cannot step on cracks between pavement squares; hates women, blacks, homosexuals, animals, and people in general with equal comic ferocity; and eats his regular artery-hardening breakfast at a coffee shop where Carol Connelly, alone among the waitresses, can endure his sarcastic tirades. She is the overprotective single mother of asthmatic young Spencer, of whom her easygoing mother, Beverly, takes care when Carol is at work.

Melvin's favorite butts are Simon Nye, the young homosexual painter who lives across the hall; Simon's black, homosexual art dealer, Frank Sachs, tough enough to crimp Melvin's style somewhat; and Verdell, Simon's pet Brussels griffon. At film's start, Melvin, annoyed by Verdell's yapping, throws the pooch down the garbage chute. But you cannot worry over the fate of a bowwow in American movies, where, unlike in Oliver Goldsmith's famous poem, dog is even more sacred than mom.

Can you, my friends, guess what happens next? You may not predict that Simon will be roughed up by rough trade (those nasty straight hustlers who sometimes beat up their gay clients), resulting in hospitalization and slow recovery. Or that Melvin will end up driving Him down to Baltimore, where his conventional, estranged parents live, or that Carol will come along on the trip. But you will guess that Melvin and Carol will start falling in love until he dumbly spoils it all--and perhaps even that Simon's painter's block will vanish when Carol poses for him nude in the trio's hotel suite. What you will surely foretell is that, after all sorts of tribulations, all will turn out for the best for everyone.

How could it be otherwise when Melvin pays for a specialist's house call at Spencer's bedside, a privilege nowadays reserved for billionaires? You will, in any case, not worry for Spencer; kids, to be sure, have come to grief in Hollywood products, but not ones of this type, where the comedy is about as good as it gets. The dialogue is lively, often bitingly funny, in this screenplay by Mark Andrus and Brooks, whose direction jolts as well as it tickles. And obsessive-compulsive disorder lends itself to all kinds of sight gags--is, indeed, the most cinegenic of ailments.

As enacted by Jack Nicholson, Melvin is, you may be sure, as lovable as he is hateful. Oh, those squinty eyes aglitter with deviltry; that high-pitched, nervefraying drawl that not only inflicts wounds but also twists a smile inside them; those somewhat bestial good looks! Everything about Nicholson makes you love hating him, and not even begrudge him the girl.

And what a girl! Helen Hunt, inheriting the part relinquished by Holly Hunter (the hunt, I guess, is of the essence), gives a great comic performance in the Irene Dunne-Carole Lombard tradition. Her Carol, more sexy than pretty, is both nervy and nervous, fiercely female and meltingly feminine, gloriously fusing the natural with the histrionic.

Greg Kinnear (Simon), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Frank), and Shirley Knight (Beverly) lend impeccable support, and John Bailey's camera suppliest oodles of colorfulness. Final praise must go to the six canines who played Verdell, with Timer doing most of the donkey work and Jill most of the star turns. The transition from Verdell's dreading Melvin to infuriatingly loving him more than his master is magisterially managed, whether by one dog or six. I wouldn't be surprised if Brussels became as famed for its griffons as for its sprouts.

Mr. Simon is NR's film critic.