Jack Nicholson’s three career-defining movies: “I’m vain enough”
Everyone has a favourite Jack Nicholson movie, except Jack Nicholson, who couldn’t separate any of his pictures from the others to call it the crème de la crème of his legendary onscreen exploits.
That’s fair enough, because the man loved acting. Not so much that he didn’t walk away after 2012’s How Do You Know and enter a leisurely retirement where he doesn’t seem to do much of anything, but he’s earned that right after spending half a century establishing himself as one of the greats.
From the 1960s to the 2010s, he was one of the very few figures in Hollywood who could always be relied on to give a watchable performance at the very least. Were all of his pictures great? No, but Nicholson was so magnetic and charismatic that even his lower-tier efforts were elevated by his presence alone.
The most-nominated and most decorated male actor in Academy Awards history, the three-time winner and 12-time nominee weathered several seismic shifts in the cinematic landscape and always emerged on the other side smelling of roses, because no matter how much things changed, Jack was always Jack.
That Jackishness wasn’t something he was completely comfortable with, not that it prevented him from grinning that shit-eating grin and carrying his baggage as a legend, icon, lothario, and coke-devouring party animal into almost every part he played, whether they were written that way or not.
When Times Leader asked if he had one flick that he’d place at the top of Mount Nicholson, he answered in the negative, saying, “I’m vain enough to love ’em all,” even the ones he didn’t rate too highly. However, there was a trio of titles that he outlined as being definitive, and one of those titles is not like the others.
“If it weren’t for Easy Rider, I probably wouldn’t be an actor,” he accurately stated. “I just looked at Ironweed again, and I was really impressed with myself in that movie. I was a lot better than I thought at the time. It was a really good movie. And Cuckoo’s Nest stands up, too. I looked at that again, and I still liked it a lot.”
Easy Rider was a counterculture classic, a landmark, a milestone, and plenty more superlatives besides, while One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest swept the ‘Big Five’ at the Oscars, and it’s one of American cinema’s elite masterpieces. Ironweed? It’s alright, but it probably wouldn’t make too many top 10s among Nicholson devotees.
Since those are the movies picked by none other than Jack Nicholson himself, though, who’s going to argue with him and say that the turgid two-hander pairing him with Meryl Streep isn’t worthy?
