Forget it, Jake
A review requested by Avshalom, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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What a bizarre coincidence befell Paramount Pictures and Hollywood at large in 1990: two of the five Best Picture nominees of 1974, neither of which remotely seemed at the time like it had left anything on the table but a helpless stare into cosmic nihilism, both ended up with sequels.* The more successful by every single metric I can think of - box office, awards attention, critical approval subsequent longevity - was The Godfather, Part III, which tells us just how low the bar is, given that The Godfather, Part III has been largely received as a disappointing, unnecessary followup, whose own director made no excuses for making the project beyond "that's what they were willing to give me money for" and has spend the subsequent decades begging us all to consider the project a kind of curious footnote rather than something we actually need to grapple with. The also-ran in 1990, then, was The Two Jakes, a very long-gestating sequel to Chinatown, Roman Polanski's putrid masterpiece about water rights and human depravity in the festering sun of pre-WWII Southern California. Unlike The Godafther, Part III, which was made under great duress but with little friction once Francis Ford Coppola gave up resisting it, some form of a sequel to Chinatown had been bouncing around in the collective heads of producer Robert Evans, screenwriter Robert Towne, and actor Jack Nicholson at least since 1976, even before the original had been fully lacquered in the constricting reputation of being one of the Great Movies; the specific incarnation of that was released in theaters in August, 1990 was in the works by the end of 1984, and was on the brink of entering production at least twice before Nicholson finally took it over, retooling Towne's script and stepping up as director, making this the third and last time he ever sat in the big seat, and the first time since the heady New Hollywood days of the '70s, when "Jack Nicholson directs!" felt less weird. Also, it was already titled The Two Jakes by the end of 1984, which is kind of astonishing, because that meant they had six whole years to think of something better, and they never managed to.
It was pretty clear already in 1990 that nobody actually wanted the sequels, and sure enough, The Two Jakes was a fairly substantial flop; nor has it ever really gotten anything resembling a re-evaluation, with its reputation pretty much stuck at "Chinatown is literally perfect, why even bother?", and unlike Part III, there have been no DVD and Blu-ray box sets requiring Chinatown fans to buy The Two Jakes if they want the original, forcing some kind of reckoning with it. This is, on the one hand, unfair; given the nature of the private detective genre, there's no particular reason why J.J. "Jake" Gittes couldn't keep showing up in disconnected adventures, James Bond-style, each to be judged on its own merits as a grubby mystery. On the other hand, The Two Jakes is certainly asking for it (and on the third hand, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, two years earlier, was a legitimately better Chinatown sequel than this could ever hope to be). Any real prospect that we can watch this and accept it as its own thing has been pretty thoroughly trashed before the one-quarter mark of the 137-minute film, when Gittes hears the name "Katherine Mulwray" on a wiretap, and the plot of The Two Jakes instantaneously becomes a story about how the detective has been emotionally scarred by the events that happened 16 years ago in our world, ten years ago in his. And wouldn't you just know it, the mystery he's investigating this time around happens to tie into the events of the mystery he investigated that time around.
So no, in fact, we cannot watch The Two Jakes free from comparisons to Chinatown, though to be honest, I think even if you tried to extremely hard, it still wouldn't do a whole lot of good. This simply isn't a very well-made thing, and it's not coming from any genuinely inspired place. In 1974, Evans, Towne, and Nicholson were hip geniuses at the heart of where the action was in '70s Hollywood; in 1990, Evans was a drug-addled maniac, Towne was a washout, and Nicholson had become incomprehensibly lazy as an actor. Plus, even in '74, their combined talents were all forced to bend around the apocalyptic energies of Polanski's directing, and while it's pretty obvious why the fugitive exile couldn't be approached to helm The Two Jakes, if he'd even have been interested, his absence is keenly felt. Nicholson's directing is... bad. It's full of enough slightly idiosyncratic choices that we cannot merely say that he's not doing anything but flatly executing the script as written, in the fashion of so many people who don't really have any acumen for directing a movie but have enough clout for this or that reason that they get to anyways. These aren't even always choices being made solely to benefit Jack Nicholson, Movie Star, though I would love to know what exactly flashed through the crew's mind on the day that they came to shoot the scene where Jack puts his hand in a sexy lady's underpants and squeezes her butt cheeks, and the camera stares leadenly at this for like ten seconds.
A lot of this is just kind of odd glances around spaces, holding back from actors in ways that, perhaps intentionally and perhaps not, have the effect of encouraging the cast to go "big" in their performances. It is not - I guess to its credit? - the kind of directing that actor-directors usually go for, where they just let the camera act as a kind of recording box while they encourage their actor buddies to try things out without the kind of merciless notes that help turn good performances into great ones. It's almost more like he's trying to make everybody slightly uncomfortable and nervous, which is perhaps one way of getting at a sense of erratic paranoia in the bright Los Angeles sun, though not one that pays off. For the most part, the acting in The Two Jakes is pretty sloppy and overdone, almost a bit amateurish in places. There are only three real exceptions to this: Harvey Keitel, playing the second Jake, real estate developer Jake Berman, is actually, legitimately good, playing a version of affable warmth that threads the needle between "what a good guy that we can trust" and "what a slimeball who has spent his lifetime honing his skill at manipulating people" perfectly, given that the question over which of those two he truly is gives The Two Jakes the closest thing it has to a central mystery. Then, Eli Wallach, playing a chummy, corrupt lawyer, is blatantly just enjoying the fact that he's almost 80 and still acting so who gives a fuck, and just pads around with pleasant, low-key charisma. The third is Nicholson itself, and I do say that he's an exception to the general tendency to overacting: he is damn near sleepwalking, in fact. There is none of the wiry arrogance masking messy, panicky confusion of his Chinatown performance, certainly. This was his very next performance after playing the Joker in Batman (the true beginning of the "Jack Nicholson is the most appallingly lazy actor of his generation" era, I would say), and it's honestly a bit fascinating to see how much of his return to Gittes feels like he's still got all of the Joker mannerisms spooled up, but he knows he can't be zany and manic, so he simply turns everything off, and gives basically the same performance, but now gives it with a drowsy yawn and no discernible energy.
Everybody outside of those three, though? Dinner theater in Peoria, top to bottom. The worst of it is Madeleine Stowe, playing one of the film's two femmes fatales, apparently because if you'd got one more Jake than you need, you might as well have an extra of everything else. It's one of the few actually tough parts in the movie, since the character shifts somewhat without warning and occasionally without any obvious story logic from terror to sultryness to sorrowful to whatever else, and Stowe deals with this by underlining every different emotional state as loudly as possible, to make sure we see how it is very different from the others. It's a fatiguing performance that leaves the character a complete hash, but she's not alone in assuming that if she overplays the muted impulses in the script, she might be able to make some sense of the undercooked twists and turns of the hardboiled clutter. Nicholson and Evans both claimed that the script was 80% done when Towne handed it off and how many of the problems were baked into his draft and how many were added by Nicholson, I cannot say. Maybe the most superficially worst aspect of the script, the demented imagery and complicated sentences of Gittes's omnipresent tough guy hardboiled narration (I don't recall if Chinatown had any narration, but if it did, it was sure as hell less than this), feel like an actor's doing, especially since Nicholson seems extremely happy to gnaw his way through the tangled forest of words laying in front of him - the narration is the only time in his performance that he feels fully awake. But the bone-deep problem that this is both trying to be an entirely different story of greed and murder and land rights than Chinatown, while also desperately plundering its emotional stakes from Chinatown, that had to be burned into the story from the very earliest stages. The weird way that Gittes both is totally unaffected by his experiences in the first movie but also dangerously obsessed with righting the wrongs he witnessed therein, based on the scene, is similarly pretty well broken at the conceptual level. Even the theoretically clever, hapless in execution way that this film's Big Twist involves a reveal of the identity of the exact same character whose identity was the subject of the Big Twist of the last movie speaks to how petrified The Two Jakes is to actually move out of the shadow of Chinatown.
All is not lost, though most of it is. The legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is fighting a fearless war to make this look decent. It's bright and sunshiny in a distinctly canned, insincere way: there's an artificial glossiness to the look of the film that's not quite "classic movie" style, but something closer to a suggestion that Los Angeles itself, by 1948, had gotten so got at being a fake place in the movies that there remained nothing not-fake about it. Which gets us close to a compelling theme than anything else in the film, so I'll allow it. That probably runs out my list of actually impressive craftsmanship: the production design and costumes are both sufficiently good at getting us back to late-'40s L.A., but not in a way that's terribly fresh or unexpected. Van Dyke Parks's score is such gonzo, weird bullshit that it's almost delightfully tacky and out of place, making this all feel trivial and carnivalesque in a way that I refuse to believe is intentional, but hey, it's a personality. And whatever personality The Two Jakes can carve out for itself beyond "there was a famous movie 16 years ago" is very much welcome.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*And the same year witnessed as well the release of Texasville, the sequel to The Last Picture Show, but that was a 1971 Best Picture nominee, not 1974, it was Columbia, not Paramount, and so it's not quite as perfect to talk about. Though it's still pretty wild that three of the most beloved films of a uniquely beloved era of filmmaking all got sequels more or less simultaneously
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
What a bizarre coincidence befell Paramount Pictures and Hollywood at large in 1990: two of the five Best Picture nominees of 1974, neither of which remotely seemed at the time like it had left anything on the table but a helpless stare into cosmic nihilism, both ended up with sequels.* The more successful by every single metric I can think of - box office, awards attention, critical approval subsequent longevity - was The Godfather, Part III, which tells us just how low the bar is, given that The Godfather, Part III has been largely received as a disappointing, unnecessary followup, whose own director made no excuses for making the project beyond "that's what they were willing to give me money for" and has spend the subsequent decades begging us all to consider the project a kind of curious footnote rather than something we actually need to grapple with. The also-ran in 1990, then, was The Two Jakes, a very long-gestating sequel to Chinatown, Roman Polanski's putrid masterpiece about water rights and human depravity in the festering sun of pre-WWII Southern California. Unlike The Godafther, Part III, which was made under great duress but with little friction once Francis Ford Coppola gave up resisting it, some form of a sequel to Chinatown had been bouncing around in the collective heads of producer Robert Evans, screenwriter Robert Towne, and actor Jack Nicholson at least since 1976, even before the original had been fully lacquered in the constricting reputation of being one of the Great Movies; the specific incarnation of that was released in theaters in August, 1990 was in the works by the end of 1984, and was on the brink of entering production at least twice before Nicholson finally took it over, retooling Towne's script and stepping up as director, making this the third and last time he ever sat in the big seat, and the first time since the heady New Hollywood days of the '70s, when "Jack Nicholson directs!" felt less weird. Also, it was already titled The Two Jakes by the end of 1984, which is kind of astonishing, because that meant they had six whole years to think of something better, and they never managed to.
It was pretty clear already in 1990 that nobody actually wanted the sequels, and sure enough, The Two Jakes was a fairly substantial flop; nor has it ever really gotten anything resembling a re-evaluation, with its reputation pretty much stuck at "Chinatown is literally perfect, why even bother?", and unlike Part III, there have been no DVD and Blu-ray box sets requiring Chinatown fans to buy The Two Jakes if they want the original, forcing some kind of reckoning with it. This is, on the one hand, unfair; given the nature of the private detective genre, there's no particular reason why J.J. "Jake" Gittes couldn't keep showing up in disconnected adventures, James Bond-style, each to be judged on its own merits as a grubby mystery. On the other hand, The Two Jakes is certainly asking for it (and on the third hand, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, two years earlier, was a legitimately better Chinatown sequel than this could ever hope to be). Any real prospect that we can watch this and accept it as its own thing has been pretty thoroughly trashed before the one-quarter mark of the 137-minute film, when Gittes hears the name "Katherine Mulwray" on a wiretap, and the plot of The Two Jakes instantaneously becomes a story about how the detective has been emotionally scarred by the events that happened 16 years ago in our world, ten years ago in his. And wouldn't you just know it, the mystery he's investigating this time around happens to tie into the events of the mystery he investigated that time around.
So no, in fact, we cannot watch The Two Jakes free from comparisons to Chinatown, though to be honest, I think even if you tried to extremely hard, it still wouldn't do a whole lot of good. This simply isn't a very well-made thing, and it's not coming from any genuinely inspired place. In 1974, Evans, Towne, and Nicholson were hip geniuses at the heart of where the action was in '70s Hollywood; in 1990, Evans was a drug-addled maniac, Towne was a washout, and Nicholson had become incomprehensibly lazy as an actor. Plus, even in '74, their combined talents were all forced to bend around the apocalyptic energies of Polanski's directing, and while it's pretty obvious why the fugitive exile couldn't be approached to helm The Two Jakes, if he'd even have been interested, his absence is keenly felt. Nicholson's directing is... bad. It's full of enough slightly idiosyncratic choices that we cannot merely say that he's not doing anything but flatly executing the script as written, in the fashion of so many people who don't really have any acumen for directing a movie but have enough clout for this or that reason that they get to anyways. These aren't even always choices being made solely to benefit Jack Nicholson, Movie Star, though I would love to know what exactly flashed through the crew's mind on the day that they came to shoot the scene where Jack puts his hand in a sexy lady's underpants and squeezes her butt cheeks, and the camera stares leadenly at this for like ten seconds.
A lot of this is just kind of odd glances around spaces, holding back from actors in ways that, perhaps intentionally and perhaps not, have the effect of encouraging the cast to go "big" in their performances. It is not - I guess to its credit? - the kind of directing that actor-directors usually go for, where they just let the camera act as a kind of recording box while they encourage their actor buddies to try things out without the kind of merciless notes that help turn good performances into great ones. It's almost more like he's trying to make everybody slightly uncomfortable and nervous, which is perhaps one way of getting at a sense of erratic paranoia in the bright Los Angeles sun, though not one that pays off. For the most part, the acting in The Two Jakes is pretty sloppy and overdone, almost a bit amateurish in places. There are only three real exceptions to this: Harvey Keitel, playing the second Jake, real estate developer Jake Berman, is actually, legitimately good, playing a version of affable warmth that threads the needle between "what a good guy that we can trust" and "what a slimeball who has spent his lifetime honing his skill at manipulating people" perfectly, given that the question over which of those two he truly is gives The Two Jakes the closest thing it has to a central mystery. Then, Eli Wallach, playing a chummy, corrupt lawyer, is blatantly just enjoying the fact that he's almost 80 and still acting so who gives a fuck, and just pads around with pleasant, low-key charisma. The third is Nicholson itself, and I do say that he's an exception to the general tendency to overacting: he is damn near sleepwalking, in fact. There is none of the wiry arrogance masking messy, panicky confusion of his Chinatown performance, certainly. This was his very next performance after playing the Joker in Batman (the true beginning of the "Jack Nicholson is the most appallingly lazy actor of his generation" era, I would say), and it's honestly a bit fascinating to see how much of his return to Gittes feels like he's still got all of the Joker mannerisms spooled up, but he knows he can't be zany and manic, so he simply turns everything off, and gives basically the same performance, but now gives it with a drowsy yawn and no discernible energy.
Everybody outside of those three, though? Dinner theater in Peoria, top to bottom. The worst of it is Madeleine Stowe, playing one of the film's two femmes fatales, apparently because if you'd got one more Jake than you need, you might as well have an extra of everything else. It's one of the few actually tough parts in the movie, since the character shifts somewhat without warning and occasionally without any obvious story logic from terror to sultryness to sorrowful to whatever else, and Stowe deals with this by underlining every different emotional state as loudly as possible, to make sure we see how it is very different from the others. It's a fatiguing performance that leaves the character a complete hash, but she's not alone in assuming that if she overplays the muted impulses in the script, she might be able to make some sense of the undercooked twists and turns of the hardboiled clutter. Nicholson and Evans both claimed that the script was 80% done when Towne handed it off and how many of the problems were baked into his draft and how many were added by Nicholson, I cannot say. Maybe the most superficially worst aspect of the script, the demented imagery and complicated sentences of Gittes's omnipresent tough guy hardboiled narration (I don't recall if Chinatown had any narration, but if it did, it was sure as hell less than this), feel like an actor's doing, especially since Nicholson seems extremely happy to gnaw his way through the tangled forest of words laying in front of him - the narration is the only time in his performance that he feels fully awake. But the bone-deep problem that this is both trying to be an entirely different story of greed and murder and land rights than Chinatown, while also desperately plundering its emotional stakes from Chinatown, that had to be burned into the story from the very earliest stages. The weird way that Gittes both is totally unaffected by his experiences in the first movie but also dangerously obsessed with righting the wrongs he witnessed therein, based on the scene, is similarly pretty well broken at the conceptual level. Even the theoretically clever, hapless in execution way that this film's Big Twist involves a reveal of the identity of the exact same character whose identity was the subject of the Big Twist of the last movie speaks to how petrified The Two Jakes is to actually move out of the shadow of Chinatown.
All is not lost, though most of it is. The legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is fighting a fearless war to make this look decent. It's bright and sunshiny in a distinctly canned, insincere way: there's an artificial glossiness to the look of the film that's not quite "classic movie" style, but something closer to a suggestion that Los Angeles itself, by 1948, had gotten so got at being a fake place in the movies that there remained nothing not-fake about it. Which gets us close to a compelling theme than anything else in the film, so I'll allow it. That probably runs out my list of actually impressive craftsmanship: the production design and costumes are both sufficiently good at getting us back to late-'40s L.A., but not in a way that's terribly fresh or unexpected. Van Dyke Parks's score is such gonzo, weird bullshit that it's almost delightfully tacky and out of place, making this all feel trivial and carnivalesque in a way that I refuse to believe is intentional, but hey, it's a personality. And whatever personality The Two Jakes can carve out for itself beyond "there was a famous movie 16 years ago" is very much welcome.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*And the same year witnessed as well the release of Texasville, the sequel to The Last Picture Show, but that was a 1971 Best Picture nominee, not 1974, it was Columbia, not Paramount, and so it's not quite as perfect to talk about. Though it's still pretty wild that three of the most beloved films of a uniquely beloved era of filmmaking all got sequels more or less simultaneously
