Chinatown - Roman Polanski

Chinatown

Please, before you read this, watch the movie, please.

This week I checked out Chinatown, a neo-noir film that is renowned for its script and story. It completely deserves it; this film surpassed my expectations on what I ever thought it would be. Jack Nicholson plays an excellent private eye that gets manipulated on three separate levels by people only looking out for themselves. Let’s take a step back though, what is neo-noir and film noir? Film Noir literally means dark film and neo noir is the extension of that, film noir deals with detectives, private eyes, or just the brawny man trying to solve a multilayered mystery and almost always dealing with a femme fatale who more often than not ends up betraying him and destroying everything he has worked for. Neo-noir is the extension of Film noir, which means everything I just detailed is still enacted, but the film came out after the initial period of film noir, the 40s-50s. In Chinatown our hard-boiled detective is a man named JJ Gittes, a private detective that is tasked with proving a man is cheating on his wife. This objective quickly changes when the husband is found dead in the river. LA is in a drought, it’s summer and they’re running out of ice (I’m loving the Watchmen series) and this makes people desperate, so desperate they are willing to kill to protect their investments. JJ follows this thread all the way to the top if the water department, meeting multiple dangerous foes along the way, including the antagonist, Noah Cross, a rapist who is also the owner of the water department. In the final act of the film the love interest and final downfall of JJ, Evelyn, convinces JJ to help get her and her daughter/sister (remember I told you Noah was a rapist) to Mexico. One problem, Noah doesn’t want her to go for a plethora of reasons. This all culminates in one science in the middle of the street with just about every important character all trying to complete their missions. As Evelyn and her daughter/sister Catherine speed away police open fire, killing Evelyn about 100 yards after her initial get away. Everything JJ has worked for has been taken away and do you want to guess what happens? The credits roll. JJ’s assistant tells him “It’s Chinatown” and pulls him away. Noah takes Catherine back to a presumably horrible life and the water crisis isn’t solved. So, two hours are wasted right? We watched the entire movie with no pay off. Isn’t that the opposite of what’s supposed to happen? Well yes, but that’s what makes Chinatown, great, the story still works. What is JJ going to do? Noah has already killed people who stood against him and even if he decided to tell everyone he is a rapist, who would it be for? The one person who that revelation would help is dead now. The entire movie deals with this theme of the rich manipulating the poor. A better way to put it – the powerful manipulating the weak and although JJ does a lot in the film, nothing he does could change that dynamic, I would argue nothing anyone does can change that, powerful manipulating the weak is how the world works and that is a terribly sad ending to a movie. We don’t trust happy endings, because nothing in life is black and white so when we see people on the screen have a completely happy ending, we don’t feel right about it. It’s interesting that this ending is fully black, its entirely negative and we trust it. We don’t question it for a second. I spoke about Joker last week and that ending is bittersweet because where it ends, he’s happy, but he’s happy because he’s done terrible things. We trust that. That ending makes sense and it follows the rules of both our world and the film's world. Chinatown’s ending does the same, it follows rules of both our world and the film's world, but it feels like it hits harder because it’s something that we know could very easily happen in our world. When the inaugural episode of Back Mirror came out it was a fictional piece, in 2015 piggate happened and all of a sudden that episode of black mirror was closer to dramatic non-fiction than it was ever supposed to be, because it was so close to reality though, because it was something you could see would happen, it made that episode incredibly thought provoking. Chinatowns ending is the same thing, in media it is not uncommon for people of power to manipulate and even kill those below them, House of Cards did this with the reporter character in the first season(s). I would not be surprised if the writers lifted that story beat directly from Chinatown because it is the same general idea, this person knew too much, and because of that they had to go, they had to be put down before they became a real problem. Besides the ending what made Chinatown great? I want to focus back on one scene, again in the final act, but before the ending, JJ thinks he has solved the mystery and goes to confront Evelyn who he thinks is a murder. The bifocals, JJ find in a saltwater pond in Evelyn’s back yard, since the autopsy revealed her husband had salt water in his lungs JJ rushes to Evelyn’s home away from home to confront her only to be told that her father raped her and she has a daughter/sister who she plans to run away to Mexico with. JJ quickly changes his mind and decides to help them, then she tells JJ something that makes us rethink the case, her husband didn’t wear bifocals. This word is repeated a few times during the scene, and it hit home for me, everything that happened to come down in one piece of evidence: those bifocals. A few moments later we see Noah put on his bifocals and everything is connected to the final scene. This movie really good. I think it warrants a few viewings as most film/neo noir’s do. It’s great, it’s interesting, it’s Chinatown.