Chinatown

1974 movie

Rating: 20/20

Plot: I think this one's about a guy (Jake Jake Gittes) who really wants a glass of water. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a glass, and a midget keeps trying to cut his nose off. He gets a Coca Cola instead, but some Chinese man keeps putting pee pee in it, presumably as a joke. Then, a guy gets killed. Then, a woman gets killed. Then, another guy gets killed. Then, Jake finds a glass for his water, but it is dirty. He then cleans the glass and finds water, but the water is dirty. He gets a water filter, a really expensive one from a store in Chinatown. He buys it for really cheap, even cheaper than the advertised price because he's got a coupon. He takes it home to try it out. Meanwhile, another person gets killed. The water filter malfunctions, and Jake drops his glass in despair. Then, he spills antifreeze on his pants. He cleans up his mess, changes pants, figures it's time he pushed a giant boulder up a small but steep hill, can't find a boulder or a hill, and decides to go ahead and take the water filter back to the store for a full refund. But he can't remember where he bought it from or find the receipt. All he knows is that it was somewhere. . .in Chinatown.

The best thing about this movie is that absolutely nothing, it seems to me, is irrelevant. Everything matters here--every line of dialogue, every gesture, every nuance, every plot point, every nipple, every cigarette, every fish, every moment. This is such a well put-together drama. It's humorous when it needs to be humorous and humorless when it needs to be humorless. There's also this existential funk that makes everything completely pointless. Poor Jake is doomed to repeat the mistakes of his previous life no matter what he does to prevent those mistakes from being repeated. There's something deeply unnerving about watching a poor guy who seems to have so much control over everything as it gradually unfolds, no matter how much things threaten to unhinge, but ultimately be nothing more than another unfortunate human being caught in the mechanism. I have always been confused about the bifocals but can forgive something like that since it's just a path leading to the greater philosophical issues anyway. It's hard to imagine noir from the 70's topping the classics, let alone surpassing many of them, but this taut drama has perfect acting, fantastic writing, a plot that is somehow overly complex while staying very very simple, and more twists than a thousand middle-aged dwarfs at a Chubby Checker look-a-like contest for dwarfs. That would be something to see, by the way. A room full of dwarfs who looked like Chubby Checker? Punch my ticket!