Everything Is Not So Jake

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE TWO JAKES Directed by Jack Nicholson; Screenplay by Robert Towne

A sequel to Chinatown (released 16 years ago), eight years in the making -- or more accurately, in the preproduction squabbling, with its release twice delayed in the past year -- The Two Jakes redefines the cliche "long awaited." It also redefines "disappointing," and possibly "excruciating" as well.

The year is 1948, and in postwar Los Angeles, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson, of course) is enjoying newfound prosperity at his old trade. For a private eye specializing in "matrimonial" cases, a fluid society with a rising divorce rate is bound to mean good times. But some things don't change. Once again a routine investigation of sexual hanky-panky leads Jake to the discovery of much larger depravities. In Chinatown it was the desire to control water in the San Fernando Valley that set the power elite at one another's throats; in The Two Jakes it is the desire to control the oil underlying the Los Angeles basin that's making folks murderously crazy. Perhaps predictably, the new case refers Jake back to the dark, terrible and (for him) unfinished emotional business with which the earlier case concluded.

Right. And then? Yes . . . er . . . um . . . At this point in a review it is customary to provide a little more detailed summary of the story, giving potential customers some concrete idea of what they're being asked to buy into. Well this time, forget it. What can be reported without hesitation is that there is another Jake, that he is played by Harvey Keitel, and that early in the film he catches his wife (Meg Tilly) in bed with his business partner and rubs him out. After that, you're on your own. In showing that what seems to be a crime of passion is actually one of dispassion, having much more to do with big money than a little sex, and in trying to tie this mess into Gittes' sad past, writer Robert Towne crosses the line between complexity and incomprehensibility.

And he places an insupportable burden on director Nicholson. This script is, of necessity, endlessly expository: dramatic confrontation is either crowded out entirely by speculative talk, or it arrives so encrusted with a multiplicity of mysterious motivations that it is robbed of impact. Try as he will (and try he does), Nicholson cannot give The Two Jakes the forward motion or the style it desperately needs. And in the end, he fails to supply that satisfying sense of closure any mystery must have. One leaves the theater not knowing for certain why anybody did anything in this movie -- and by this time, not much caring.

What this film misses most is a character like Noah Cross, whom John Huston played with chilling false charm in Chinatown. The trail that led to him was as convoluted as the story line in this movie. But we knew all along the footprints had to arrive at his doorstep, and when they did, we confronted an unforgettable monster, whose political and economic immorality was of a piece with his sexual perversion. Dramatically he was an antagonist who functioned as a powerfully clarifying force, resolving, vivifying all the movie's ambiguities. There is just no one like him here, though Ruben Blades, the singer who is turning into a delicately ironic actor, might have fulfilled the role if his gangster character had been more fully developed. Unfortunately, like everyone else in this huge, wasted effort, he is merely glimpsed wandering in a labyrinth that never draws us into its enigmas and finally stupefies both curiosity and involvement.