Great!

Rating: 8/10 (23 November 2000)

I had heard As Good As It Gets was a great film, but then again, I was told Anaconda was a great film, so I didn't know what it was going to be like. The result of As Good As It Gets was very good indeed, actually, forget that. It was great!
Melvin, played by an impressive Jack Nicholson, earns his crust, absurdly, writing cheesy romance novels, and lives as reclusively as he can in a Manhattan apartment. One of his obsessive rituals is breakfasting daily at a cafe where only salty waitress Carol (Helen Hunt) - a single mother with her own stressful woes - will tolerate Melvin's diatribes and sass him back.
When Simon (Greg Kinnear), a gay artist who lives across the hall, is hospitalised, old misery-guts Melvin is coerced by Simon's agent (Cuba Gooding Jr.) into caring for his despised neighbour's ugly but endearing mutt and - you betcha! - bonding is soon afoot as the pooch wags its way into Melvin's corroded heart. Thus softened up, Melvin is reluctantly but irrevocably goaded into a series of grudging good deeds which are entirely motivated by self-interest but which inch him in the general direction of humanity and improbable but superb redemption.
Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt both won Academy Awards for their memorable, brilliant performances, but the rest of the cast aren't bad when it comes to acting. Greg Kinear is excellent, Cuba Gooding Jr. is great as usual and a brief but impressive performance from Skeet Ulrich secures As Good As It Gets' supporting cast. James L. Brooks is also the perfect director for this film, his efforts to make this film great succeed.
This dramatic but funny film is well worth a look.
I rate As Good As It Gets 8 out of 10.