Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 18

Not Reds for Warren Beatty – what kind of book do you think this is? For Jack Nicholson! Warren Beatty … The man with the loveliest, slowest pulse in cinema versus an actor who is forever trying to hoodwink you that his heartbeat is faster than it actually is. The guy who always acts less handsome than he is versus the preener: you're always mentally cleaning up Nicholson's face and mentally trying to ruffle Beatty's. The vulnerable versus the unhurtable. The living versus the dead. Nicholson is the greatest actor since, let's say, the time between the Beatles' ninth LP and the birth of Zinedine Zidane, whose work is founded on a sense of humour. They're not terribly funny, those geniuses whose names end in ‘o’, are they? Here are ten more words to kill any smile – Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, Edward Norton, Gary Oldman. Serious business, great acting. Nicholson plays a small role in Reds as the playwright Eugene O'Neill being manipulated by Beatty's lover Diane Keaton into thinking he's seducing her. It's all rather sad and Chekhovian. She tells him that Beatty has gone away, leaving her to get on with her own things here in this beach house on Long Island.

‘What are they?’ he asks.

‘What?’ says Keaton.

‘The things that you have. That are yours. What are they?’

– this in his Nicholsonian way, turning over every word, holding it up to the light, inspecting it, and then judiciously pondering whether to place it, with great delicacy, in the world or just to, what the hell, smash it.

‘If you were mine,’ he goes on, ‘it would just be you and me. And it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.’

By this time you're pretty much rolling around on the floor clutching your ribs and screaming stop! stop! though there is nothing ostensibly there in his delivery except O'Neill's love, his courage in declaring himself, and the glimmer of an accusation against Keaton's way of life with Beatty.

But you're killing yourself, because everything Nicholson says is given its sense by how near or how far it is from the pure delight that makes up his soul. Not sniggering mischief, as people always say of him – delight. It's what makes him so tragicomic. Nothing he says isn't a fuse burning towards some dynamite-pile of hilarity. And he makes brilliant use of its absence, sparingly, and devastatingly, like in the two scenes in Five Easy Pieces (his best film) when he walks out on Karen Black. You think: My God, where's it gone? He reminds you of just how much you've got to lose, of how high the stakes are. Everything he does in his early films is to do with the frustration of this delight. You've got to be a comedian to be a tragicomedian. He'd be brilliant in Chekhov. Brilliant as Astrov in Uncle Vanya, the still-not-disillusioned doctor not a million miles from his not-quite-yet-disillusioned pianist in Five Easy Pieces.

It's so close, this delight. All you have to do is laugh and the world will be full of it. And in his early films Nicholson keeps trying to tickle the world and failing to make it laugh. Meanwhile, we're laughing our heads off. Even to know that delight, in a perfect world, would be the proper response to life is a simplicity beyond most of us. It's not something that any of those other great actors mentioned above seem to have worked out. Do you know how rare this is? This innocence? Why you keep thinking Jack is a boy? It makes him one in a million. It makes him able to tell the story of the loss of innocence which nobody, only great artists, can do. What an absolute privilege to watch the young Jack liven up Easy Rider (he's the only utopian in it!) and talk you through the fall in Five Easy Pieces and tell you what you're leaving behind in The Last Detail. Amazing, amazing. It's the heart of Nicholson – that his essential self remembers innocence, remembers, no matter how scuffed, a prelapsarian world. And that's why the revered and lauded three-time Oscar winner is very, very underrated. Yes, you heard me! Jack Nicholson is underrated.