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JONATHAN BAUMBACH
since
Cul de Sac
and at the same time a further limiting of his sights, an
indication that he has made substantial compromises with his ambition as
an artist. A smokey, yellow-toned takeoff on
The Maltese Falcon
and
The Big
Sleep,
less takeoff than homage, less homage than highly personal variation,
Chinatown
is an eerie and obsessive work, an occasion for the director's
romantic vision of a murderously corrupt and impotent world. Our own
cynicism, really a romantic readiness to be disillusioned again and again,
has caught up to Polanski's.
Unlike
The Long Goodbye,
Altman's detective movie to end detective
movies,
Chinatown
adheres by and large to the conventions of the genre. But
only up to a point. In the classic detective film, the world was a fairly awful
place, dissolute and compromised, but the knightly hero, pure of heart and
oblivious to his own mortality, usually found some way of setting things
right. Polanski's world is not susceptible to restoration. The pursuer of
justice, that romantic fool , is ineluctably doomed to grief.
Like so many recent films,
Chinatown
is about snooping, a profession to
which the filmmaker brings a complicit sympathy. Polanski's hero,
J. J.
Gittes Uack Nicholson), is a private detective whose specialty is marital
infidelities. The film opens with a succession of semi-pornographic stills,
our introduction to Jake Gittes's profession and the first of the film's
several shocks. Although involved in the tawdriest aspects of his profession,
Gittes turns out to be-that predictable irony-a more honorable man than
a corrupt society can successfully sustain .
Whereas Altman's artsy cinematic manner is almost always in some
kind of counterpoint to his narrative, Polanski's elegantly obtrusive style
(made up principally of wide-angled shots) makes concessions to telling a
story. What
Chinatown
and
The Long Goodbye
have in common, despite
opposing approaches to similar material, is a self-conscious concern with
personal signature. For whatever else it is,
Chinatown
is a triumph of style.
It
is one ofthose films that reviewers with an indifferent appreciation ofform
tend
to
say lacks substance . The narrative, within and beyond genre con–
ventions, is tricky to a fault , the cynical ending something of a cheat.
Chinatown
punishes our best hopes. The new "seriousness" in American
movies is the defeat of audience expectations. Nothing works out as we
want it, says middlebrow cynicism, reflecting the impotence and despair of
our public lives.
The stylization of
Chinatown
and the authority of Polanski's direction
make the film 's disturbing resolution seem almost reasonable. The film is
full of wonderful ghostly details, a nostalgic pastiche of old detective
movies transformed by a doomsday imagination. The embattled private
eye of the forties genre movie tended to fall for unscrupulous women who
would compromise his integrity, if they could, to save their own skins. The
