Chinatown review

Rating: 10/10 (3 December 2003)

`Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown!' Long before The Pianist, Roman Polanski's other classic was Chinatown, a film based on a place with its own rules, logic and morality. Unfortunately for private investigator Jake Gittes (who else but Jack Nicholson), Chinatown is a place where ghosts have advised him to do `as little as possible'; yet that technique is almost unfeasible when emotions are thrown into the mix. Like Harry Caul from the other great film paranoia-noir of 1974, The Conversation, Jake involves himself too heavily in one case and winds up in the same place with no sanity for human nature. As in most films Chinatown ends where it begins. This time, it just happens to begin in the back-story.
Chinatown could very well mean more than just a place. It's also arguably a state of mind. What else would you expect from film noir? John Huston (yes, that John Huston) plays the incestuous crooked man, Noah Cross, who goes from owning the Water Dept. to owning the police and anyone else with a price. Yet, the corruption that happens to Jake in Chinatown-perhaps on both instances-is not corruption directly from Chinatown. Chinatown is a place where police have been known to avoid the rigors of street life. And it's not because the Chinese, or the other immigrants who reside there, are more than or just as dangerous as anyone else. Many of the larger North American cities have a Chinatown, often confused with being untouched by the law because of `language barriers'; more applicable reasoning would say that it's a place where upper government simply doesn't care what happens there-that people in Chinatown are led to ruining (even killing) themselves.
In one particular scene, Jake is lying in bed with the widow of a recently-murdered water department chief engineer, Evelyn Cross-Mulwray (a brilliant Faye Dunaway). After revealing his hopes of assisting her on the case to overcome his past, Evelyn's profile is turned to the camera with an inscrutable, symbolized extension of her eyes and lighting of her skin-could she soon too be Jake's Chinatown ghost?
Chinatown's screenplay is right by the book (some say it's the finest ever written) and all the actors, especially Nicholson, do a wonderful job emphasizing its black humor. You wouldn't expect any laugh-out-loud moments in a crime mystery thriller like this; but with a cocky P.I. played by Nicholson, there's plenty. How ridiculous is it when sheep trample into a courtroom in one of the film's opening scenes? Or how about Jake, for seventy-five percent of the film, running around playing detective with a Band-Aid on his nose? There are also plenty of jump-out-of-your-bed moments as well. Similar to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre which also came out in 1974 (there seems to be a lot of relevancy between films of that year), bad things seem to happen during daylight. In fact, Chinatown is not a very dark film noir at all; perhaps that's part of the suspense in witnessing one of the most disturbing endings of all time.

5/5 stars