When I was just a teen, and my job duties for a community newspaper included that of movie critic, I sometimes found myself at screenings with the other critics, all of whom worked for larger media outlets and who excluded me outright from any conversations. At one such screening, the critic for the city’s largest newspaper walked in joked, “I’ll pay anybody five bucks to tell me what The Two Jakes is about.” Even if I had been welcomed into the conversation, I couldn’t have told him, as I had not seen that recently released picture. I had not even yet watched 1974’s Chinatown, the legendary film to which Jakes is the sequel.
Today, I could give him a rough overview of the assorted conspiracies that are woven together in the 1990 film. And yet, these threads do not add up to a comprehensive experience to which I would normally apply the word “plot”. Per that one critic’s confusion, this film is over-complicated but I wouldn’t apply the more benign word “complex” to it.
The critical disdain for this picture precedes it, and I knew it would be challenging to approach it with the intention of as objective a review as possible. In my heart, I knew it wouldn’t come close to the grandeur of Chinatown, and that is coming from somebody who is a fan of that picture but doesn’t love it. Of course, the sequel would not have the return of Roman Polanski on either side of the camera, as he has not set foot on U.S. soil since the 70’s. Instead, star Jack Nicholson helms the picture and does so, at best, competently.
The first problem with the movie is that it cannot stand on its own, and that it deliberately tethers itself so tightly to its predecessor. I was surprised Nicholson doesn’t still have the bandage on his nose from the events of a decade-and-a-half earlier, but he will end up with a huge wad of bloody toilet paper up a nostril in one scene.
The characters and events from Chinatown will be referenced or make appearances to a ridiculous extent. Some of these are just flashbacks to footage from the other film. Faye Dunaway provides voiceover, reading the contents of a letter read by Nicholson, a piece of correspondence that I doubt she was likely to have written before her demise in the earlier movie. James Hong returns as the same character as before, but as a man changed by the time which has passed since then.
A great deal is made of what happened to Dunaway’s daughter, an element which feels shoehorned into the storyline. It’s like the creative minds behind this sequel wanted to tie themselves to the Polanski’s film as tightly as possible, in some misguided belief that, “If you put Chinatown in the pantheon of cinema, you have to take us with you!” I take no pride in correctly guessing what happened to this character, nor that I guessed it more than an hour before it is revealed. It might have been more difficult to do so in a complex picture but, once again, everything here is just a mess of complications. Gaze into the hole between the threads and you’ll see the answer clearly.
Everything here is an obfuscation, staring with the first scene, where Nicholson’s private eye is trying to coach Harvey Keitel on what to say when he busts into a hotel room to confront his wife (Meg Tilly) and her lover. The plan is for Nicholson and his crew to record this from the adjacent room. What they don’t plan on is Keitel shooting her lover dead.
The detective also didn’t do his homework, as the deceased is Keitel’s business partner in a community development company. Those houses happen to be under construction on land that used to belong to Dunaway’s family. That land has oil under it, and that is putting bubbles of flammable gas in the tap water.
There’s also gangsters, the deceased’s troublesome widow (Madeleine Stowe), a suspicious moving company, contentious police, a clandestine gay bar and a land office clerk with his jaw wired shut. All of these may be elements of this cuckoo clock, but I’d say it is up to the observer to decide if these obfuscations and detours constitute plot. One long scene puts Nicholson and Keitel on the links, and I wondered if the reason for this particular scene was so they could be paid to play golf.
One of the things the film gets right, to the best I can tell, are the period details. There are oil wells everywhere, an element I am always surprised to see in some noirs of the time which take place in L.A. In one scene, Nicholson is driving at night and listening to The Whistler on the radio, something I only know about from the movie adaptations starring Richard Dix. Then there’s the wire recorder the detective uses in his trade, a device I have only seen on YouTube videos about historic electronics.
Other elements are either aspects of the time I never would have imagined, or they might be outright fabrications. Tilly has a spa day at place with separate rooms, each marked for blonds or redheads only, making me wonder if this was some weird form of segregation and whether they also had separate drinking fountains by hair color. When the police bust the gay bar, they appear to also take the parrots into custody. One moment that is just gross and stupid has Nicholson make detective David Keith fellate his own pistol. This film was made before Tarantino did anything, and yet it feels like the kind of thing that would be the low points of his oeuvre.
Some of the performances are better in this than others. My wife came in about half way through the runtime and observed Nicholson looked bored and on the verge of falling asleep. Stowe is in a thankless role, culminating in a sex scene where the manner in which she loses clothing is so daft and unbelievable that I wondered if it was meant to be farcical. Tilly’s performance is, frankly, terrible. But I was pleased to see noir veteran Eli Wallach as a lawyer, Richard Farnsworth in essentially the John Huston role and, most notably, Tom Waits as a cop.
Speaking of which, much of Nicholson’s constant and overbearing narration sounds like lyrics Waits would discard in the first drafts of a song. Consider: “Clues that keep you on the right track are never where you’re looking for them. They fall out of the pocket of somebody else’s suit you pick up at the cleaners. They’re in the tune you can’t stop humming that you never heard in your life. They’re at the other end of the wrong number you dial in the middle of the night. The signs are in all those old familiar places you only think you’ve never seen before, but you get used to seeing them out of the corner of your eye and you up tripping over the ones that are right in front of you.” And that’s when the voiceover isn’t telling us exactly what we are seeing on the screen at that time.
So help me, I tried to keep an open mind while watching all of this and, admittedly, I spent the first half hour wondering if the critics had been misguided, that they couldn’t consider the picture on its own merits and not in comparison to Chinatown. Then I started feeling less receptive to the film and figured I was an hour in, only to discover only a half-hour had transpired. When I was truly an hour in, I was miserable and ready to bail. This is one long slog and it is difficult to think of a reason sufficient to recommend it to anybody.
The Two Jakes has many problems, but a big one is not that it can’t escape from under the shadow of Chinatown, but that it tries to put as much of itself there as possible. It even tries to justify this in some of the interminable narration, in lines like “You can’t forget the past any more than you can change it.” True, but you also don’t need to wallow in it. You may, indeed, get two Jakes, but you get less than one movie.
Dir: Jack Nicholson
Starring Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, Meg Tilly, Madeleine Stowe
Watched on Paramount blu-ray