Superb on every level

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2007)

After seeing this movie (I picked it up from Best Buy while getting the Sin City special edition), I realized how much a film can truly make you think. The themes alone that permeate the plot; we protect what we love but you can never fully protect anyone, power corrupts, there isn't always a happy ending, etc.
Not to mention the purely adult way in which these themes are represented, with superb acting, direction that paid close attention to detail, an environment that was very bright but made the shadows that much darker, and a villain that was so despicable and vile that you felt as empty as Jake looked at the end of the movie when Evelyn was killed and Noah walks away with his bastard daughter wrought by incest, not to mention the financial success him and his friends would still enjoy from the new levy being built.
It's absolutely impossible to see a noir, which is typically dark and blurry throughout the film, to come up with an ending that doesn't satisfy us completely. We have to make up our own minds, use our own little private dicks inside our heads to determine what ends up happening in L.A. and not to mention what happens to Evelyn's daughter.
It's typical for a detective noir to end on a very final note, with that last piece of the puzzle being put into place within the last ten minutes and then the protagonist making everything right again, by finally doing the right thing. This movie didn't have that. Everything was put together, but you don't get the moral satisfaction that the other movies offer. You get a very bright movie with an even darker and blurrier ending than most noirs offer throughout the entire movie. It's Chinatown.
Now onto the acting. The acting was absolutely superb on all fronts. Faye Dunaway's Evelyn stole my heart, Jack Nicholson was the perfect protagonist (always trying to do the right thing, yet always failing. Proving a major theme in this movie, futility), John Huston's Noah Cross was the most brilliantly played role and I, like everyone else, attribute it to the fact that he was the master of noir for a long time.
Now, the writing. I don't care what anyone else tells you, everything in this movie is absolutely necessary, if you pay attention to everything being shot and everything being said. It might take multiple viewings, but otherwise, it's a fantastic story with characters that are both larger than life and yet less than, as well, creating humanity. The writing was spectacular.
The directing was fantastic. Roman Polanski crafted a masterpiece. He must have put a lot of work into this movie, because the attention to detail, knowing what to keep in frame and what to cut out and giving subtle hints as to the end throughout had to have been tough, but he absolutely did it.
Everything that came together and meshed so well in this movie shines through. You can take them all separately or just sit back and enjoy the entire thing. Either way, you'll be impressed and awed.