With apologies to everyone who made this delightful and dark character study, we have to start with a scene in another movie.
It’s the chicken sandwich scene in Bob Rafeleon’s Five East Pieces. I saw it, in its entirety or most of its entirety on some clip show somewhere. And then tracked down the movie.
The scene is famous because Jack Nicholson gets to explode. And the scene is funny. But it connects because Nicholson isn’t just screaming at a waitress who won’t make a simple order, he’s screaming at society; which invents rigid, rules and demands that everyone live by them. It’s the kids of the ’60s, man, howling at their parents.
Anyway, Five Easy Pieces is a classic, but it’s also a shaggy bit of business.
When I say shaggy I mean that the scenes feel like the director set up a camera, gave the actors some points to convey, and then said, “action.”
Then you get Method Actors showing off their stuff.
In some movies, the shagginess is written that way and sometimes it really is a brilliant ad-lib from an actor or a director on set. I’m not sure it matters. Movies are a strange alchemy where you really can spin straw into gold.
King of Marvin Gardens is shaggy too. Except for the stunning opening.
It’s just Nicholson, his face half hidden in darkness, telling a story about the death of his grandfather. It feels like a play and it seems written, perhaps overwritten. But you can’t turn away and it’s mesmerizing.
The rest of the movie takes place in the shadow of that opening monologue. The movie seems to reject the initial story and then as we go on we see that every line of that story was true. Spiritually true, emotionally true, even if the details are not fact.
After the monologue, we get to what I kept thinking of as the fun and games portion of the movie.
Again, it feels like Rafelson just sets the camera down and tells his actors to play the scene however they want and the story will take care of itself. Damn fun for the actors, maybe a struggle, at times, for those of us who expect clockwork precision from a movie script.
Nicholson, who is playing the insular mousy character in this flick, has a brother played by Bruce Dern.
His brother has a dream and a scheme involving Hawaii and casinos and money from the mob.
Most movies might demand that we show the audience the steps as Dern either reaches or fails to reach his goal. And there are things that happen here that seem to suggest how Dern is doing on his venture.
But mostly, the movie is just scenes where Dern, his two girlfriends and Nicholson hang out in Atlantic City in winter. The movie isn’t very much interested in Dern’s schemes but it is fascinated with Dern himself and his impact on the women in his life and on Nicholson’s psyche.
I was struck at times because the characters seem to be reacting to things the audience hasn’t seen. You might think you missed something. Perhaps the explanation for some of the behavior that was left on the cutting room floor.
Does that hurt the flick? Nope. I was never lost and each scene works as its own small thing inside the movie. But again, those looking for a traditionally structured movie will be unmoored.
Nicholson knows, or seems to know, that Dern will never make his dreams come true. But if there is tension in the movie at all, and there isn’t much until the end, it’s in wondering how far Nicholson will let this go. Will he ever step in? Will he fly to Hawaii with these people knowing that the only thing waiting for them there will be the same problems they have in Atlantic City?
What’s the cost when you crush someone else’s dream?
You would not be surprised to learn that Dern and Nicholson were supposed to play the opposite parts but in the run-up to filming everyone decided they should switch.
The movie works incredibly well because of that. Nicholson normally gets to be explosive. The chicken sandwich scene is a perfect example of that. Here, all the work has to be done internally. He’s on a slow boil.
Dern’s having a ball being a scheming cad. The sexual revolution is put under the microscope and it’s interesting how even at this early stage Rafelson seems to come to the conclusion that it is men, not women, who have won a victory there.
Ellen Burstyn, Julie Ann Robinson, and Scatman Crothers get a little bit of business. Burstyn, in particular, shines but also gets to be the character with several emotional breakdowns or breakthroughs.
The climax is tense and not necessarily predictable. You can sort of see it coming but until it actually happened I wasn’t sure that the movie would actually pull the trigger.
I enjoyed how Crothers and Nicholson negotiate over Dern’s fate and what is owed to whom and for what.
After the climax there is a shot of Nicholson looking back, staring at another character. And he burns hot but he doesn’t say a word. It’s incredibly powerful and Nicholson conveys it all with half his face. Most of it is done with his eyes.
Later, Nicholson returns home and you see him once again telling a story, telling a part of this story. Then he has a moment with another character and apologizes for a small thing.
He has left a door open.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to.”
Dark Highways 