Director: James L. Brooks
Starring: Jack Nicholson,Helen Hunt,Greg Kinnear,Cuba Gooding, Jr.
I think that the producers of As Good As It Gets somehow brainwashed the world. Everybody told me this movie was great--all the critics loved it, it was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, and for a few minutes I actually thought I liked it. Once I began thinking for myself, though, I realized it wasn’t a good movie at all, and at that point it became my sworn duty to bring the rest of the world to its senses.
The plot was unique, which is the closest thing to a complement I can say about it. It follows the intertwined lives of three characters: Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), a disgruntled obsessive-compulsive author; Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt), a single-mother waitress at the restaurant where Melvin eats; and Melvin’s gay artist neighbor, Simon Bishop. After being severely beaten by one of his artistic subjects, Simon is hospitalized, leaving Melvin to care for Bishop’s dog, despite the neighbors’ hatred for each other. When Simon recovers to find his life ruined—no apartment, no career, no money—he and Melvin form a tenuous friendship. In the midst of all this Melvin begins falling in love with Connelly, in one of the strangest (and least effective) romances ever. Melvin secretly sends an excellent doctor to treat Connelly’s ailing son, and when Connelly finds out it was Melvin who changed her son’s life, she is eternally grateful. The whole thing comes together when all three characters leave for Maryland to help the estranged Simon ask his parents to bail him out, and naturally I won’t spoil the ending, even if it wasn’t that special.
Basically, As Good As It Gets lacks two important elements essential to a romantic comedy—romance and comedy. First of all, Carol, the love interest, is just plain annoying. Like Jerry Maguire, this movie tries the whole lonesome single mother bit that’s supposed to make us root for the girl to get the guy, but louses it up miserably. Renee Zellweger comes off as innocent and adorable in Jerry, but Hunt’s character is whiny and totally plain—she even dresses plain. Who cares about someone like that?
The other problem is that Melvin is a complete a-hole. From the movie’s opening scene when he stuffs his neighbor’s dog down a laundry chute we see how awful a human being he is. He keeps being a jerk through the whole movie, and he never really changes! By the end, I had no human interest in seeing Melvin and Carol get together, only a desperate hope that their getting hitched would put a sock in Carol’s constant whining.
If you want to see a quality romantic comedy, rent Jerry Maguire. And if you feel like doing the public a service, quietly remove the “Romantic Comedy” label from the video store’s copy of As Good As Gets, lest anyone else be fooled into believing that this movie is either funny or romantic.
