The Most Perfect Movie Ever Made

Rating: 10/10 (14 February 2010)

Chinatown is one of the few movies I consider perfect. I've seen it several times and when I start thinking about it, dismantling the several aspects that constitute it, I don't find anything wrong about it. Perhaps only Lawrence of Arabia has such an equal perfect synthesis of acting, writing, cinematography, editing, story, pacing, music and atmosphere.
The movie starts with private investigator J. J. Gittes following a man named Mulwray, whose wife thinks is cheating on her. Gittes takes photos and they make their way into a newspaper. Gittes unknowingly became a pawn in a smear campaign. Furthermore, he discovers that Mulwray's real wife, Evelyn, wasn't the person that hired him. And then Mulwray shows up dead.
Chinatown is a movie that simultaneously draws inspiration from the source of film noir and changes this genre. It is not a coincidence that John Huston, the director considered the father of film noir (The Maltese Falcon), plays a supporting role here. Roman Polanski knows his film history and knows how to give credit where credit is due. But Huston was also a good actor so his role here is more than deserved, indeed I could not conceive this movie without his performance: he plays an odious, disgusting, unrepentant bastard with such conviction it's difficult to see where the performance ends and the person begins.
And then we have Faye Dunaway, playing one of the greatest femme fatales in history. She's a mix of untouchable angel and demonic temptress; she displays a cold reservation about the people around her, a misleading fragility that hides a dangerous mind. Although I've never liked Dunaway much, I think no one has come close to portraying hopeless despair and dread as she does in this movie.
But Chinatown also modernises the genre. Not that film noir was ever bad, but the conception of realism is something that changes with time, and what was realistic in Out of the Past or The Maltese Falcon seems unconvincing nowadays. The tough Sam Spade gives way to J.J. Gittes, a down-to-earth private eye who worries if his involvement with murder suspects and his tinkering with evidence won't make him lose his license; and who wears a bandage in his face almost the entire movie after a knife cut. This frailty, this concern with mundane details was unthinkable in noir before Jack Nicholson. The '70s have my favourite performances by Nicholson – One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; the movie he made with Antonionni, Professione: Reporter; The Last Detail – and my absolutely favourite is his role as Gittes, an otherwise good-intentioned detective who gets involved in something that's too much for someone as insignificant as him to handle. For although he's the hero of the movie, he's that modern type of hero that achieves nothing.
Chinatown is a movie where nobility and heroism meet a dead end. Fatalism, that other gift from classic noir, is much present here. Gittes is a man trying to do good in a world that has no conception of goodness anymore, and he only makes things worse, little by little, until the unforgettable (foretold) ending where everything is tied up. Few movie endings carry such a punch as Chinatown, but it's the only ending suitable.
Roman Polanski and Robert Towne, the original screenwriter, deserve all the praise in the world for having created this masterpiece. So do the three main actors. And on a final note, Jerry Goldsmith also deserves recognition for his beautiful score, so beautiful and delicate in its melancholy, that it feels like the movie translated into musical notes. They all deserve to be forever remembered for one of cinema's masterworks.