The Two Jakes

This is how Roger Ebert started out the review of the 1990 “The Two Jakes,” “Here at long last is Jack Nicholson's "The Two Jakes," seven years in the trade papers, center of prolonged teeth-gnashing at Paramount Pictures, and it turns out to be such a focused and concentrated film that every scene falls into place like clockwork; there's no feeling that it was a problem picture. It's not a thriller and it's not a whodunit, although it contains thriller elements and at the end we do find out whodunit. It's an exquisite short story about a mood, and a time, and a couple of guys who are blind-sided by love.”

The movie is set in post-war Los Angeles – Ebert said, “The 1940s of the baby boom and housing subdivisions – instead of the 1930s city where “Chinatown was set. It’s not the loving city it once was. Private eyes like J.J. Gittes, reprised by Jack Nicholson, are a little more tired with time and care. Ebert said, “The Gittes of "Chinatown" was the spiritual brother of Philip Marlowe.” However, not that the war is over, and Gittes has moved out of the two-room suite into his own building with his own staff of detectives. He is owned by a country club, has a fiancée and has gained some weight. Ebert said, “One of these days he's going to stop calling himself an investigator altogether and become a security consultant.”

However, he still solves some of the cases he’s used to. The cases where a furious husband breaks into a motel room and finds his wife in bed with an adulterer, and then the investigator jumps in with a camera and takes photos that will help him in divorce court. He knows, Gittes says narrating the film’s beginning, that he shouldn’t take one these horrible cases anymore. He’s way past them and they’re not on his level. Sometimes, he still does the cases.

That’s how he meets the other Jake – Jake Berman (Harvey Keitel), a property developer who thinks his wife (Meg Tilly) is cheating on him with his partner (John Hackett). Gittes tells Berman how he should act when he breaks in through the door, and what to say, and then they find a motel where the cheating is supposed to happen. However, Berman doesn’t follow the steps. A gun appears out of nowhere, and the partner is shot, and the partner’s wife, played by Madeline Stowe, thinks that maybe it wasn’t a cheating case at all. Maybe it was cold-blooded murder, and Berman wanted to kill his partner so that he and his wife could get his partner’s money on the property development. That might be why Gittes is needed for the murder.

So far, what we see is the type of story that any private eye movie might have been happy for. However, “The Two Jakes” uses the story only when it needs the deeper and more worrying things it has to say.

Everyone who worked on this movie looks like they have gone through the private eye genre and come out on the other side. The screenplay is by Robert Towne, who at a time was supposed to direct the movie in the difficult history it had being made. He doesn’t only brought together some characters from his “Chinatown,” added some new ones, and put them in the plot. Ebert said, “This movie is written with meticulous care, to show how good and evil are never as simple as they seem, and to demonstrate that even the motives of a villain may emerge from a goodness of heart.”

Jack Nicholson directed the film, and Vilmos Zsigmond photographed it, in the same way. Ebert said, “This isn't a film where we ricochet from one startling revelation to another. Instead, the progress of the story is into the deeper recesses of the motives of the characters.” We see that Gittes – fiancée and all – still is really scarred by the murder of the Faye Dunaway character in “Chinatown.” He will never forget her.

We see that the property being made by Berman has been seen before by Gittes, so long ago. We see that love, pure love, is a reason necessary to defend shocking actions. We also see that the past has been so important to us, it will never leave our memories.

Ebert said, “The movie is very dark, filled with shadows and secrets and half-heard voices, and scratchy revelations on a clandestine tape recording. Out in the valley where the development is being built, the sunshine is harsh and casts black shadows, and the land is cruel - the characters are shaken by earthquakes that reveal the land rests uneasily on a dangerous pool of natural gas.”

The performances are dark and depressing as well, especially Nicholson’s.

Ebert said, “He tones down his characteristic ebullience and makes Gittes older and wiser and more easily disillusioned. And he never even talks about the loss that hangs heavily on his heart; we have to infer it from the way his friends and employees tiptoe around it.”

Ebert goes on to say, “Right from his first meeting with the Keitel character, when he notices they are wearing the same two-tone shoes, he feels a curious kinship with him, and that leads to a key final confrontation that I will not reveal. And he feels something, too, for the Meg Tilly character, who has been deeply hurt in her past and is afraid to express herself. She is like a bird with a broken wing.”

The moral of “The Two Jakes’ is that love and loss are more important than the automated circulation of guilt and justice. When Nicholson and Keitel, as the two Jakes, have their final meeting of shocks, it is such a good scene because the normal considerations of a crime move are put on halt. The movie is all about the values that people have, and about the things that mean more to them than life and freedom. It’s a deep movie, and a thoughtful one, and when it has ended you will not easily forget about it.

If you haven’t heard of this movie, now you have. If you haven’t seen the movie, see it, especially if you saw and liked “Chinatown.” This is a powerful movie, and an underrated one that I don’t think people must have heard of, or didn’t really like. It’s actually a good one for everyone to see it, so definitely see it and give it a chance.

Stay tuned next week for the finale of “Jack Nicholson Month Part 2.”