The Two Jakes (dir. Jack Nicholson, 1990)
It is 1948. The war is over. Private investigator J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) has settled into a comfortable middle age and an even more comfortable income bracket. He even has a membership at the Wilshire Country Club. The events of 1938 are behind him, he thinks.
His current client is Julius “Jake” Berman (Harvey Kietel), a real estate developer who believes that his wife Kitty (Meg Tilly) is having an affair with his business partner Mark Bodine. Gittes’s job, such as it is, to record them in the act as Berman confronts them. A simple adultery job goes awry when Berman shoots and kills Bodine. A clause in their contract would allow Berman full control of Bodine’s share, assuming he’s not found guilty of murder. Not wanting to be charged with an accomplice in Bodine’s death, Gittes must prove his own innocence in an increasingly complicated situation that involves Bodine’s widow Lillian (Madeleine Stowe), mobsters and vengeful cops, oil, mineral rights, and a woman from his past he never thought he would hear from again: Kathryn Mulwray, who had disappeared years earlier.
The Two Jakes does not have a good reputation. Part of this is due to a fraught production history, marked by years of delay and disagreement. Screenwriter Robert Towne wished to direct the film himself, given that Roman Polanski had absconded to Europe rather than serve a sentence for statutory rape. However, producer Robert Evans, who had come to Hollywood with dreams of becoming an actor instead of producing The Godfather and being executive at Paramount, wanted to play the Jake Berman role. Those of us who remember the Comedy Central cartoon Kid Notorious can attest to how bad an idea that would have been. Ultimately it fell upon Jack Nicholson himself to direct the sequel, set a decade after the events of the first film but released sixteen years later.
The other reason is that the film seems to have so little reason to actually exist. Why would Chinatown need a sequel? It succeeds in part due to the awful finality of Gittes’ failure. He should be a completely broken man after the events of the film and yet The Two Jakes positions him now as an upwardly mobile war hero? And if the film is going to revisit Kathryn Mulwray, what could that even entail, especially with John Huston unable to return as Noah Cross?
I suspect that Towne and Nicholson pushed so hard for a sequel because of their vocal dissatisfaction with the ending of Chinatown. They found it too bleak, too nihilistic. Returning to the story of Jake Gittes and Kathryn Mulwray could then a corrective, a way of finding hope and redemption in the darkness. It could also serve as a way for Towne to further explore the development of Los Angeles into the city we all know–in this case, the postwar expansion into suburbia and oil rather than water as a driving force.
As for the success of the film?
Well, I suppose that depends on how you feel about voice overs and explosions.
Aside from the ending, the other major change that Polanski made to Chinatown was the elimination of Gittes’ first person narration. Instead, that film replicates the limited perspective found in a Raymond Chandler novel by having Gittes present in every scene. The audiences experience events as he does. Towne, having a more sympathetic ally in Nicholson, could now make use of his original idea in the sequel, and it rather changes the tone of the film. What inference and subtly could do in the first film, Gittes can now give monologues:
Time changes things like the fruit stand that turns into a filling station. But the footprints and signs from the past are everywhere. They’ve been fighting over this land since the first Spanish missionaries showed the Indians the benefits of religion, horses, and a few years of forced labor. The Indians had it right all along. They respected ghosts. You can’t forget the past any more than you can change it. Hearing Katherine Mulwray’s name started me thinking about old secrets, family, property, and a guy doing his partner dirt. Memories are like that–as unpredictable as nitro, and you never know what’s gonna set one off. Like the clues that keep you on the right track are never where you look for them. They fall out of the pocket of somebody else’s suit you pick up at the cleaners. They’re in the tune you can’t stop humming, that you never heard in your life. They’re at the other end of the wrong number you dial in the middle of the night. The signs are in those old familiar places you only think you’ve never been before. But you get used to seeing them out of the corner of your eye, and you end up tripping over the ones that are right in front of you…
Chandler made it look easy. The difference between the techniques of the two films, as you can see, is a little hokey and a little jarring. Almost as jarring, in fact, as Towne’s decision to make explosions a full-on motif in The Two Jakes. The first time it happened is surprising if for no other reason that I did not expect that to happen in a Chinatown sequel, to say nothing how Nicholson films it. The second instance with a grenade just felt absurd. The final one is so obvious when it happens, but I was still astounded because of the sheer audacity.
The somewhat lighter tone and more lively style distinguish The Two Jakes from the austere and restrained Chinatown, and make it seem much more like a pastiche of noir movies than a reworking of the genre. That’s not a bad thing, not necessarily, and if the first film had been more in line with this knowing approach, I suspect that The Two Jakes would have had a much warmer reception from critics and audiences. And I think that it is also to the film’s credit that when it does refer back to the events of Chinatown, all the jokes stop and we see just how traumatized Gittes is by what happened in 1937. All that time and professional success mean nothing when he’s confronted with a past that, as he says in the closing line of the film, “never goes away.” If you’re lucky, you can achieve a small degree of closure, which is more than hope than Chinatown ever offered.
oliveresque 