As Good as It Gets: A Well-Built Film with a Real Performance and a Real Problem

James L. Brooks built a career on difficult people learning to tolerate the world, and As Good as It Gets hands him the most difficult of the bunch. Jack Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a bestselling romance novelist who is also a bigot and a man living with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He washes his hands with a bar of soap exactly once and throws it away. He eats breakfast at the same table in the same restaurant every morning, and he brings his own plastic flatware to do it.

That is the premise. The film around it is a 139-minute romantic comedy that won two Academy Awards and made $314.1 million on a $50 million budget. It is also a movie that keeps asking you to find Melvin charming while he behaves badly, and that is where it earns and loses its keep.

Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Melvin Udall and the Soap Bars

Melvin avoids stepping on sidewalk cracks. He runs rituals with switches and locks. He uses paper towels to touch public restroom faucets and door handles. The film treats these as the architecture of a man who cannot leave his apartment without a plan, and Nicholson plays the rituals without winking at them. The compulsions are not jokes. The rudeness is.

Carol Connelly, played by Helen Hunt, is the only server at the restaurant who tolerates him. She is a single mother with a son, Spencer, whose asthma is acute enough to shape every decision she makes. When Carol quits to work closer to home in Brooklyn so she can be reachable for Spencer, Melvin cannot adjust to a different waitress. So he arranges to pay for Spencer’s considerable medical expenses for at-home care, on the condition that Carol returns to the restaurant.

That transaction is the hinge of the movie. Carol thanks him profusely, then declares emphatically that she will never have sex with him. Melvin is humiliated. Brooks stages the humiliation without letting either character off the hook, and it is the best scene in the film.

Greg Kinnear and the Dog Named Verdell

Greg Kinnear plays Simon Bishop, Melvin’s apartment neighbor and a gay artist. Simon starts working with a new model, Vincent Lopiano, played by Skeet Ulrich. Vincent cases the apartment and lets his friends in. They assault Simon and nearly kill him during a robbery.

Simon’s agent, Frank Sachs, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., intimidates Melvin into caring for Simon’s dog Verdell, a Griffon Bruxellois, while Simon is hospitalized. Melvin does not enjoy it at first. Then he becomes emotionally attached. When Simon comes home, Melvin tolerates a neighborly relationship with him mainly so he can keep seeing the dog.

The dog is the film’s most efficient device. It gets Melvin out of his own head without asking him to explain himself, and it gives Nicholson something to play against that cannot talk back.

A Robbery, a Bankruptcy, and a Road Trip

Simon’s injuries, his lack of medical insurance and his high medical bills bankrupt him. He falls into depression. Frank persuades him to go on a road trip, and the film’s back half turns into a three-hander: Melvin, Carol and Simon in a car, working out what they owe each other.

Here is the running order of what the film actually asks you to track:

What the Oscars Got Right

At the 70th Academy Awards, As Good as It Gets was nominated in seven categories, including Best Picture. Nicholson won Best Actor. Hunt won Best Actress. It remains the most recent film to win both lead acting awards.

Both wins hold up. Hunt has the harder job, because Carol has to be a person with a life rather than a reward for Melvin’s growth, and she plays the exhaustion of a mother with a chronically ill child without turning it into a plea. Nicholson’s win is the more complicated one. He is genuinely funny, and the film’s structure depends on you laughing at a man you would not sit near.

The supporting cast does real work in small rooms. Shirley Knight plays Beverly Connelly. Jesse James plays Spencer Connelly. Yeardley Smith plays Jackie Simpson. Lupe Ontiveros plays Nora Manning. Harold Ramis plays Dr. Bettes. Lawrence Kasdan plays Dr. Green. Bibi Osterwald plays the Neighbor Woman. These are the people who make Melvin’s world feel populated rather than staged.

Where the Film Slips

The film’s tagline is “A comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” That is an accurate description of its ambitions and an overstatement of its results.

The problem is that As Good as It Gets wants credit for Melvin’s bigotry being a symptom and also wants to use it as a punchline. Brooks and co-writer Mark Andrus never quite decide which one they are doing. The compulsions are treated with care. The cruelty is treated as material.

There is also the matter of the money. Melvin buying Spencer’s medical care is the film’s central act of generosity, and the film knows it is uncomfortable. Carol’s suspicion of his motives is the right response, and the movie is smart enough to let her say so. But the film never really untangles whether Melvin is being kind or buying access to a woman he has decided he wants. It lets the ambiguity sit there and calls that depth.

It is not depth. It is a loose thread the screenplay chooses not to pull.

The Dog Cannot Argue Back

The dog is the film’s best idea and its easiest one. Verdell gives Melvin a relationship with no stakes and no conversation, and Nicholson plays those scenes with more ease than anything else in the movie. But a dog cannot challenge Melvin. It can only accept him. The film leans on that acceptance to do work that the human relationships should be doing.

Simon is the character who should be doing it. He has lost his health, his money and his sense of safety, and he is the one person in the film with a legitimate claim on Melvin’s attention. Kinnear plays him with a softness that keeps the character from becoming a lesson, but the screenplay keeps handing Simon’s best material to the road trip rather than to the friendship.

On the strength of all that, As Good as It Gets is a well-built film with a real performance at its center and a genuine problem at its foundation. It is ranked 140th on Empire magazine’s “The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time” list, and that placement is generous. The film is funny, the craft is high, and the two lead performances are the reason it survives. But the movie never earns the emotional resolution it stages, because it never makes Melvin reckon with the cruelty it spent two hours using as comedy.

What matters here is Hunt. She takes a role that could have been a prize and makes it a person. What is noise is the film’s belief that Melvin’s compulsions and Melvin’s bigotry are the same kind of problem. They are not, and the movie’s refusal to separate them is why it lands at 6.7 of 10 rather than higher.

90s Cinema · As Good as It Gets · Helen Hunt · Jack Nicholson · James L. Brooks · movie review