fantastic film

Rating: 9/10 (23 November 2009)

This is one of the most exquisite "new noirs" to come out of Hollywood in the past few decades. The story, a deceptively simple narrative about water rights in Los Angeles of the 1930s, points a cold finger at the heart of Hollywood itself. Jack Nicholson is dynamite as the crafty P.I. hired to take out dirty laundry who gets himself caught up in the mess.
I've never been a huge fan of Faye Dunaway in this film, but John Huston as the villainous Noah Cross more than makes up for any sentimentality on her part. He plays the role with his whole body and soul, really making us believe in this person, which is what makes his character so uniquely terrifying in film history. The director Polanski himself makes one of the film's most memorable guest appearances as a "midget" goon who takes a knife to the hero's nostril.
"Chinatown" itself is the place where Nicholson's character Jake Gittes used to work the beat as a legitimate cop -- the name and the place are hovering like a ghost in the margins of every scene of the film. It symbolizes both Gittes' lost idealism and a kind of place where evil inevitably wins. It's a dark undercurrent running through the film unseen until the climax. Basically I think the film is about how little of what's happening that we're actually able to see, at least at first glance. Thus the role of the detective becomes, as it does in most of the great "noirs", a metaphor for the role of a living person generally. What lies beneath is something that we might have been better off not knowing about; something we're powerless to fight because it's rooted in human nature itself.