1972 drama
Rating: 15/20
Plot: Based on the true story of the saddest game of Monopoly ever played, this is about two brothers, one who keeps rolling doubles and then argues about the rule that you have to go to jail when you roll doubles three times in a row and the other who keeps trying to build a hotel on a railroad.
This Rafelson and Nicholson collaboration seems like the kind of thing I might like more the more times I watch it, but I don’t really want to watch it again. Nicholson’s good in a role more subdued than the one in Five Easy Pieces or even The Last Detail. It’s great watching him do his Jack Nicholson thing in an opening minimalist scene where he’s telling a story about a fish bone. Bruce Dern doesn’t look like he could be Jack’s brother. Dern is a little out of control here, but in a good way. It’s just like how this movie feels like the 1970s but in a good way. Maybe it’s the Nicolson, maybe it’s the Kovacs cinematography. Maybe it’s the randomness of conversations on horseback or an auctioneer or Terre Haute’s own Scatman Crothers. Scatman Crothers is the type of actor who can make any movie better. That or he’s just in good movies. I think part of the problem with this movie is that it’s hard to know what’s going on because not a lot seems to be going on and the characters aren’t going anywhere. You know from the beginning, probably because this is a movie from the 1970s, that this is not going to end well, and watching how it languidly moves toward that inevitability, a sluggishly meandering pace, just doesn’t feel very American at all. It’s all bookended by Charles LaVine as Grandfather, an actor I could have sworn was somebody else. Alas, this was his lone movie, but he’s good in that I actually believed he could have been somebody’s grandfather. He’s on screen for the final shot of this thing, one of those great closing shots that is powerful because it’s both beautiful and heart-wrenching. Oh, and a fake Miss America show the characters put on somehow manages to be both goofy and devastatingly depressing which is an even harder combination than beautiful and heart-wrenching. It was hard for me to make my mind up while watching this movie, but I eventually settled on it being a good one. I still don’t want to watch it again though.