The Two Jakes, Chinatown and how the past never goes away

    " I suppose it's fair to say that infidelity made me what I am today. I know lots of investigators won't handle divorce work. The truth is, not that many guys are good at matrimonial work. It takes finesse and experience. Hell, everybody makes mistakes, but if you marry one, they expect you to pay for it for the rest of your life. I don't care whose fault it is, his, hers or the milkman's. If one of them comes to me, it means they're both miserable, and that's my job, putting people out of their misery." - Jack Nicholson's opening voice-over narration for The Two Jakes               

Opening shot,with Peggy Lee singing the classic, "Don't Smoke in Bed", over the credits. Great directorial touch.

                                                                                           

             In 1990 Paramount Pictures released The Two Jakes, the much anticipated sequel to 1974's neo-noir classic Chinatown. It was dumped on the marketplace in August, usually the dead zone for summer movies, which shows that Paramount didn't have much faith in the film's box office potential or it's strength as an awards-type of film. If Paramount had been smart they would have released the film in the fall when more serious minded movies with Oscar potential start to see the light of day. The late 80's and early 90's was an curious time to revive interest in sequels to great movie's from the 70's. Texasville, Peter Bogdanovich's follow-up to his landmark film, 1971's The Last Picture Show and Francis Ford Coppola's second sequel to The Godfather, The Godfather III, were both made in 1990. The bad thing is despite the many good things about these undertakings is that there was no way in hell they could possibly top their predecessors. Consequently all of these sequels to seminal one-of-a-kind movies-for a variety of reasons-fell flat at the nation's box office. I liked them all, yet the originals were impossible to top, like catching lightning in a bottle. The scenario couldn't have played out differently.                    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

The poster, like the film, was good but not quite up to the standards of the first.

       Nicholson's The Two Jakes {it's the last of three films he has directed to date} has an obsession with the past that is one of it's major virtues. The past of detective J.J Gittes {Nicholson} haunts him in ways he probably hadn't given much thought to in the previous few years. The film opens in 1948, right before Halloween. Post-war business is booming and no where is it exploding more than in the City of Angels. Gittes is also profiting. With a beautiful, young and chic fiancee, an impressive golf handicap-he owns the building his detective agency operates from-Gittes seems to have it all. As he tells his associate Lawrence Walsh {Joe Mantell reprising his part from the first film}, " I'm the leper with the most fingers." That doesn't mean he is invincible, far from it, for J.J Gitttes' past life hangs over him like a thick layer of the L.A. smog that hovers over the city. This private eye who specializes in divorce cases is hired by another Jake - Berman - because his wife Kitty is fooling around on him. What J.J doesn't know is that Berman's wife will plunge him back into his past, back to Evelyn Mulwray {Faye Dunaway from Chinatown supplies a crucial voice over here}, and back to "... old secrets, family, property and a guy doing his partner dirt. Memories are like that, as unpredictable as nitro, and you never know what's gonna set one off. "

Meg Tilly as Kitty Berman, the shy, adulterous wife of the other Jake.

       That The Two Jakes failed at the box office is a matter of record. Why it did is another matter entirely. One could say the ghost of the first film was too great to overcome, or that director Nicholson assumed his audience would be paying close attention to the plot and subtleties and nuances of the characters and the actors playing them, or that if they didn't it wasn't anyone's fault but their own, or that cinema-goers in 1990 didn't really care about a sequel to a movie sixteen years old {unlike, say, a cinephile like moi}. At 137 minutes long, the film is at times ponderous with a dense plot, but not that difficult to follow or guess the final outcome of the mystery. The film has many virtues, but I wouldn't say pacing is one of them. If "Captain" Jack gets a demerit for this film, the pacing would be the main suspect. What The Two Jakes does have is an impressive attention to period detail in it's production design; warm, glowing cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, a master; an excellent cast willing to give all for their director; among the standouts are Harvey Keitel as the other Jake, Meg Tilly as Berman's wife the mysterious Kitty and Madeline Stowe, in a rather thankless, mostly comedic role, as wife of the man Berman kills. The return of some of Chinatown's original cast, besides Jack and the aforementioned Joe Mantell, are quite welcome and a nice touch, with Perry Lopez as Lt. Escobar and James Hong as Khan, formerly Evelyn Mulwray's servant and apparently living a not bad post-war life,all  return to the scene of the crime. The stellar cast also includes Richard Farnsworth as an aging, crafty, good-ol'-boy oilman, Fredric Forest as his lawyer Chuck Newty, Eli Wallach as Berman's counselor Cotton Weinberger, and Ruben Blades as Jewish gangster Michael 'Mickey Nice' Weisskopf {a knock-off on L.A gangster Mickey Cohen}. The script is by Chinatown's writer, Robert Towne, but rumors through the years have persisted that the old fashioned voice-over narration {which contain some of the film's best lines} was written by everyone from legendary writer/director Billy Wilder to Jack himself. Towne originally wanted Gittes character to be the main thrust of a trilogy on L.A :  Chinatown dealt with water, Jakes  with oil, and the third film - so far unmade - would be about air and the smog that has affected that city for at least 60 years. The third film would also have J.J embroiled in his own divorce case and was set in 1968.

Jack in charge. In an interview years later Jack, usually a soothing presence on set, claims to have yelled a lot and been short tempered during the filming of Two Jakes, due to the pressures of production.

      It is not common for a writer to fashion a work to a particular actor, yet  Towne penned Chinatown for Nicholson. Watching The Two Jakes for the umpteenth time, I can't help but feel it's personal project for Nicholson. All the talk of the past is vital to the story, obviously, but also to Jack himself. Nicholson has some interesting revelation's regarding his own family life, like the reported fact that the woman he thought was his mother was really his grandmother, and June, who he thought was his older-by-seventeen-years-sister, was his real mother. Jack learned of his family's duplicity just as Chinatown was being set for release with Jack giving a round of interviews to newspapers and magazines. The evidence, dug up by a Time magazine reporter, flabbergasted Jack as he apparently had no idea of his murky parental history. That June was his mother is pretty much fact, the father however, is publicly still up in the air. Perhaps Nicholson is unsure as well. All this is a reminder of how The Two Jakes and it's predecessor delve into the Mulwray/Cross family tree. I suppose every family has a tale or two and some may be messier than others, but these films deal with a family of power, wealth, greed and incest. Incest. That's one family secret that no one ever wants found out. But in Chinatown {*spoilers, folks, spoilers*} Jake discovers that Evelyn's daughter, Katherine, is the product of a liaison between Evelyn and her father, Noah Cross. That J.J feels responsible for Katherine in Two Jakes is quite touching and completely in keeping the faith with Gittes' character from the original film in trying to set things right, Gittes' rewriting of the past.

Gittes goes to visit Khan, Evelyn Mulwray's butler from Chinatown, with a picturesque view of the Pacific.

       During Khan's conversation about Evelyn's daughter, Khan says J.J is a prisoner of the past, that he would do the young woman more harm than good, to which Gittes replies " I don't want to live in the past Kahn. I just don't want to lose it. " The past, how it affects the people who inhabit the movie's universe and the production's faithful re-creation of a post-war Los Angeles is one of the things I like best about the film. Gittes' voice over narration, seemingly an old fashioned way of storytelling, fits perfectly to the era Nicholson is trying to capture. From the Pontiac car ads and 'The Whistler' radio program that plays from Gittes' car to the vocabulary of the voice over {using the term 'filling station' in place of 'gas station' goes a long way with me}, to Gittes visiting a gay nightclub while conducting his investigation and it's world that is underground, a sub-culture that was victim of prejudice and hate and could only exist in the shadows. Also the costumes, hair, and production design, the visual element that any film worth it's salt will provide, is almost a given. Hollywood, with it's vast technical resources at it's disposal, can lend any film a recreation of a particular era. All I have mentioned and more give the film an acute feel and sense of atmosphere.

The two Jakes.

In an interview Nicholson once stated he is a biographical actor, and I believe his J.J Gittes character holds a big place in his heart. I earlier wrote Gittes was written with Jack in mind. Let's look at the name, J.J. Nicholson's birth name is John Joseph Nicholson. Hence the J.J. Jack arrived in Hollywood shortly after his high school graduation in 1954. At that time Hollywood was still a place of dreams and make believe. One of his first jobs was in the cartoon department at the old MGM Studios in Culver City. All gone now. No Pussycat Theaters back then {or now, even}, no homeless folks shuffling up and down Hollywood Boulevard, little senseless crime and gang violence. Gangs in 1948 meant Mafia, not Bloods and Crips. The world was still widescreen, color and CinemaScope. Two Jakes opens in 1948, not exactly when the young Jack arrived in SoCal, but a close enough approximation. Jack remembers what the town was like and how much it has changed and Two Jakes is not only about people but a time and place that doesn't exist anymore and the film winds up being a sad, reflective movie, not one of the characteristics usually associated with Nicholson or his movies, nor of film noir or neo-noir, but he is Irish after all, and if you ever see his acceptance speech at the 1994 American Film Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony, when he was it's youngest recipient {at age 57} of that once prodigious award, you will witness a man who is emotional and reflective with a deep sense of where he came from and the journey he has traveled. Two Jakes is not a perfect film. It doesn't have the jaw-dropping "My sister, my daughter" scene or intensity of it's older film brother, but viewed with an open mind and no expectations, is quite entertaining, though not in a mindless X-Men or Iron Man kind of way. Our appreciation of film is based on the past we have experienced. Everyone has a past, good or bad. We all have regrets and deeds we would like to forget. The way we view our past through a deluded prism of our minds eye is what keeps us together, keeps us sane, keeps us going. Without our illusions we might as well quit before we start. The Two Jakes reminds us that it isn't always so easy. It takes a lot of work to remake the past in our own image and that there are three versions to every story : yours, mine, and the truth. Like Gittes tells Katherine 'Kitty' Berman about the past and it's haunting presence, it never goes away.  

Sources : Jack's Life by Patrick McGilligan
               IMDB on Chinatown and Two Jakes
               Wikipedia on Jack Nicholson, Chinatown and Two Jakes
                ...and the viewing of the two films on disc.