Favorite Films: "Chinatown"

Not many films have been endlessly analyzed and examined as Roman Polanski's Chinatown. It would be foolish for me to try to add anything to the academic and artistic discussion of the movie. All I can do to explain why it's such a favorite is to try to share why it works on me so well, why it feels as urgent and vibrant and new today as it must have 52 years ago.

There's a scene in Chinatown that's a masterpiece of storytelling and suspense — not as if that doesn't apply to the entirety of this complicated, endlessly rewarding movie. J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson, of course) wants to know why a certain dead body has turned up in a certain reservoir. None of his police pals are going to give him anything more to go on. He'll have to do this alone.

So, there he is, behind the gates of the secure reservoir at night. We have no idea what he's looking for, because he has no idea what he's looking for—which, of course, is the plot of Chinatown in a nutshell: Gittes only knows he's onto something, he never has any idea what. Neither do we. Then, from the darkness:

"Hold it there, kittycat!"

An impeecably dressed little man holding a knife, played by Polanski himself, flashes a knife as Gittes' rival Claude Mulvihill pins him to a fence. "You know what happens to nosy fellas?" asks the ltitle man. I know, I know, I'm describing a scene you've probably seen a half-dozen times, but have you ever noticed the way the crickets chirp in the background? The inkiness of the night behind the fence?

These two little details are key to Chinatown, and Polanski doesn't make a big show about either. But, he's included them, perfectly, for a reason: Everything around Gittes is dark and unknowable, and the forces of nature that make it all work are entirely indifferent. As Chinatown progresses, Gittes uncovers and confronts evil and corruption on a magnitude he never imagined possible — and those crickets in the night? They'll keep chirping no matter what.

Chinatown is a despairing movie, a film that confronts real evil — not the imagined kind from The Exorcist, released the year before, but the kind that lives in our world. The kind we have to face every day. Polanski had lived through the Holocaust, but it's worth noting that J.J. Gittes and the other characters in Chinatown, which is set in 1937, have not. True, unexpurgated evil is unknown to them. So, it's understandable that as Gittes starts investigating the case he thought was brought to him by Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), he has no idea of what he's getting himself into.

I've seen Chinatown innumerable times, and it's grown from a film I admired but didn't entirely understand to a movie that I think is utterly indispensable — not just in my mind, but to Hollywood and, to a larger extent, to an understanding of America. It's a movie whose real meaning is as deeply hidden as its solution, but once you uncover it, Chinatown takes on the feeling of a philosophical treatise.

That last line — "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" — has been dissected over and over. It's become a cinematic version of semantic satiation, that odd experience of hearing a word so often that it loses its meaning. But keep examining that line, and what happens after it's spoken, and Chinatown truly reveals itself:

There's no explanation. The only thing you can do is walk away, stunned, into the night — that same night that consumes a world that has been here for millions of years and will be here for millions more, and takes no notice of your suffering, of cruelty, of pain and sorrow. You'll never, ever understand it. And the more you dig for answers, the fewer you'll find. People are terrible. The world is awful. And that's just the way it is.

Bleak? You bet. And yet, such despair has rarely been as involving as Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne make it in Chinatown. As I watched it again a few weeks ago, time fell away — yes, it's easy to recognize young Jack Nicholson and young Faye Dunaway and long-gone John Huston and the rest. It's obvious the film was made a long time ago. And yet, the way it casts its spell, the way it grips the viewer and refuses to let go, makes it feel every bit as fresh and new as a movie made this year. It's perfectly cast, perfectly designed, perfectly edited, perfectly scored (by Jerry Goldsmith), perfectly shot (by John Alonzo), so perfectly crafted it seems almost set apart from other movies.

It's so easy to watch, so entertaining, so compelling, that it's not until those last couple of minutes that you're reminded, yet again, of everything the movie is meaning to say — that Gittes is every one of us. Poor, stupid Gittes, smart enough to find the truth but not smart enough to understand it. He keeps believing that somewhere, somehow, there's got to be a rational explanation. That if he just keeps trying, he'll find a way to stop all this. How painfully familiar all of that sounds right about now.

Like I said, it could have been made today.