Jake on Jake

Sometimes you pick up a movie because everyone raves about how good it is. When we’re talking about films that are considered true classics, Chinatown frequently comes up. The neo-noir film, written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski (who is a terrible human being, let’s make no mistake there), is regularly cited as a masterpiece of the form. A dark, twisty film that keeps the audience guessing while it tells a tale of ruination. People love this film, and it’s a movie that film fans are told they must watch to truly love film.

Well, I watched it… and I didn’t love it at all. Don’t get me wrong, on a technical level the film is very well made. It’s shot beautifully, the performances are on point, and despite a runtime that runs over two hours it never feels like it drags. This is a very well made movie (something no one says about its sequel, The Two Jakes), and I can see why, technically, people rave about the movie. But when it comes to the actual narrative, Chinatown just didn’t hook me. There’s a lot going on in the film but the story was too twisted around itself to really work as a functional narrative for me.

I know, that’s sacrilege to say about the film. That’s the kind of admission that gets you kicked out of the film review club. And yet I have to be honest about it. Maybe it was just built up too much for me over the years that by the time I finally got around to watching it there was no way the actual film could live up to the reputation it had earned. Whatever the case, Chinatown is a very functionally well made film that I don’t think I’m ever going to want to watch again.

The film focuses on J. J. "Jake" Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a private investigator running a very successful agency. Gittes is called in on a case of a (supposed) jealous lover when a Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray (Diane Ladd) comes into his office claiming that she knows her husband, Hollis I. Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), is cheating on her. Gittes looks into the case, following Hollis around, looking into his life, until he finds the man meeting with a young woman. They seem very familiar together, so Gittes takes the photos and passes them off to the supposed Mrs. Mulwray.

As it turns out, when the photos end up in the paper, Mrs. Mulwray wasn’t actually Mrs. Mulwray. This is discovered when the real Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) comes into Gittes’ office, ready to sue. She swears her husband wouldn’t cheat on her, and she wants his name cleared. However, when Hollis ends up dead, Evelyn is suddenly ready to drop the case and let it all go. This only gets Gittes deeper into the case, though, as he starts digging into Hollis’s job as the head of the L.A. Water Department, discovering a larger conspiracy surrounding L.A.’s water, land being bought up on the outskirts of the city, and people willing to kill over it. The only question is how all of this relates to the girl and what Hollis was really doing the day before he died.

Chinatown is a film that sets up a really long, elaborate crime story, a mystery so deep, and so far reaching, that it feels like the whole city will fall down on Gittes at any moment. Credit to the film, the deeper Gittes gets, the more oppressive the whole affair feels. Gittes goes from a cocksure detective to a man very deeply in over his head, and watching him dig in, finding new threads, now angles, and seeing it all pile up on him, does get you invested in his character. This is a fall from grace story, and that aspect of the film really does work.

Much of that really should be credited to Nicholson. The actor played Gittes fantastically. His bravado is on full display early on, as the detective thinks he knows how the city works and how all the pieces are supposed to come together. Watching Nicholson take Gittes and move him through the story, letting him slowly deteriorate and crumble as the events of Chinatown unfold, it’s watching an artist at work. Nicholson is lost in the role in all the right ways, and he makes Gittes a presence on the screen.

I think where the film loses me is probably around the point where a lot of people actually would get more interested in the work. The film has a lot of pieces all going on at once, from the water crisis in L.A. (which was a big deal in the 1930s, when this film is set), the land being bought up, Hollis’s involvement (or not, as the case may be), Evelyn, the girl, and more. Many of these threads, though, are really just red herrings to the conclusion of the story, and what bothered me is that so many threads are set up but most of them, in the end, don’t actually pay off what becomes the main story (which, despite how old this film is, I won’t spoil). It’s too much, with too little connection to the final thrust of the film, and that bothered me.

As I said, many will probably like this because it gives so many hints to the mystery at hand, and then all of these hints come up for nothing. The stories people tell are unreliable, and the evidence Gittes finds doesn’t actually matter in the end. Gittes’s case gets too big, there are too many parts, and the detective can’t keep up. It might be realistic, but it makes for an unsatisfying conclusion to the story. You want to see things come together better than this, but so much is left hanging that you realize the story you were actually invested in doesn’t matter at all.

That’s what gets me. The reality of this film is really well built. It’s gorgeously shot, well dressed, and well acted. On every technical level this film is masterfully made. Some might even argue the story itself is fantastic, but I don’t. A film can have a dour ending, it can leave minor moments unresolved, but when a film sets up massive storylines that it then says, “hey, that wasn’t really what mattered,” that’s when it loses me. And that’s what Chinatown does. It puts Gittes deep into a story and then says, “a lot of what he dug up doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it, Jake.” I just can’t stand storytelling like that.

I don’t want to say the film is bad. I think if someone were to tell me that Chinatown was awful, I’d find myself defending it (not the director, who is a piece of human garbage, but the film itself). I don’t want to argue against the technical skill on display with this film. But I am a story person, through and through, and the story of Chinatown left me feeling unfulfilled. The story goes to places and then doesn’t follow up, and by the last act it shifts its whole narrative, making you realize just how many red herrings it was setting up. Even that would be fine if there was some follow up on those threads before the conclusion. But so much is made in the story without any of it paying off, and as a story person I can’t handle that. If you put rifles over fireplaces you have to fire them off.

So yes, Chinatown is a technically impressive film… but I also don’t like it. Maybe it deserves its rep as a classic, maybe it doesn’t, but I know for sure this isn’t a film I’m ever likely to revisit. There are other films on my list that are well made that also have stories that work for what I’m looking for. Chinatown doesn’t scratch that itch, and I doubt it ever will for me.