THE TWO JAKES
With Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, Meg Tilly, and Madeleine Stowe.
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Screenwriter Robert Towne, who is said to have objected to the downbeat ending to Chinatown that Polanski substituted for his original happy one, has once more provided a yarn in which the private and public lives of the characters dovetail with grim inevitability. In 1948, just as in 1937, Jake Gittes finds himself the victim of a messy con, set up with a fake divorce case that leads directly to huge land swindles and then back to a doomed intimacy. Once more, little snippets of overheard conversation and seemingly chance bits of information conspire to bring the past into the present. Somehow Katherine Mulwray, the daughter/sister of Chinatown’s Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), is involved in the case. Jake Gittes has a chance to go back to a failure and pull out a success.
Yet it is easy to see why Towne may be discomfited by The Two Jakes, because this meditation on the past is less an essay on the mutability of good and evil than on the way the past and present frequently occupy the same space. In other words, this is Jack Nicholson’s movie.
One of the film’s preoccupations is the geography of Nicholson’s body, the persistence of intelligence and drive in a body that has ceased to fully respond to commands. When a woman throws herself at Gittes for a passionate bout of sex, the breathless detective, unable to match her physical onslaught, falls back on his voice and stature.
But the final third of the film manages to pull itself together for a finely timed gallop. Vilmos Zsigmond, taking his cue from John Alonzo’s work in Chinatown, has provided a canvas that manages a dark clarity, and Gittes works his way through the exurban and suburban landscapes in a groping march. The careful seeding of doubles and foreshadowings finally results, literally, in a destruction that to an extent manages to obliterate some of the shadows cast by the past onto the future.
