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As Good As It Gets Customer Reviews (58 - 60 of 68 Reviews)

Starts off good, gains momentum
Lots of movies I liked pretty well the first time I saw them weren't nearly as appealing when I see them again some years later.

I recently saw this movie for the third time on DVD, and darn if it doesn't get more delicious every time.

The writing is so crisp it snaps. The acting is so pleasurable it's like being ring-side at a 3-ring circus. The direction, photography, set design, art direction, etc.

I hear often in recent reviews that Jack Nicholson is given roles where he gets, essentially, to play Jack Nicholson. This is not to imply that Jack is any flavor of heartless romance writer with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - but it means that the "Jack" we get to see in this movie seems a good guy to spend 2 hours with. Helen Hunt, Cuba Gooding, Jr and Greg Kinnear make perfect stand-ins for our desire to "hang out with Jack".

This is the movie that "Something's Gotta Give" desperately wants to be - yet this film exceeds that more recent work by pretty much every measurable marker.

I'll watch this film probably once a year as long as I live. The one time I saw Something's Gotta Give was enough.

Ho-Hum
If you enjoy watching conversations between your grandparents and their friends, this movie it is for you. In 62 years of movie watching I can honestly say this is the most boring movie ever made. You will first be bored by watching the commercials that you have just paid to see. The writer of this, "worst of Jack Nicholson", fiasco did us a favor by allowing us to watch the first 2 minutes that is the entire movie. The balance of which is the same as those first 2 minutes. Save your money or buy Enron stock, the entertainment is far better.

One of the '90s most beautiful comedies
Another reviewer comments that the events in this film conspire to make Jack Nicholson (or rather Melvyn Udall) a human being. On the contrary, this is a film where the central character, an obsessive-compulsive bigot, is human from the start: We just don't realize it. A key moment in the film is when Simon, Melvin's gay neighbour (Greg Kinnear), is telling the young male prostitute, Vincent (Skeet Ulrich), about his art, and comments that he likes to watch people because sometimes, when you look at someone long enough, "you see their humanity." At that point Vincent is momentarily enabled to see something beyond the seedy world of male prostitution; at the same time Simon gives us the interpretive key to the whole movie. It is a film about three very different people who discover their common humanity.

Melvin is a hateful and insensitive recluse with a debilitating mental disorder; Carol (Helen Hunt), a Manhattan waitress struggling with her son's chronic illness and finding her identity swallowed up in the process; Simon, a gay artist who loses everything when he is attacked and robbed in his own home. One by one they must learn to see the humanity in each other and, as importantly, in themselves ("Where'd I go?" asks Simon as he looks at the reflection of his battered face in the mirror). We, too, must learn to see the human being underneath the spiteful and vicious (if somewhat the "loveable rogue") in Melvin.

The theme is developed sensitively and beautifully throughout the course of the film (perhaps only slightly overlong at more than two hours), with help coming from a fourth character, Verdelle, a dog, whose pivotal role in the narrative is easily overlooked (standing in the same cinematic tradition as Toto of "The Wizard of Oz"). By the end of the film, we are aware that the big issues in the character's lives are still to be totally overcome, but the process of resolution has begun as it should, with the characters each recognizing the dignity and worth of the others (and themselves).

James L. Brook's delicate direction carefully avoids excessive sentimentalism and saccharine sweetness (though admittedly, it teeters perilously close to the edge at times), and results in one of the most charming and profound comedies of recent years.

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