Word: nicholsons
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Rafelson's hero is David Staebler (Jack Nicholson), a late night radio monologuist who broadcasts private traumas packaged for cultural consumption. He leaves the sordid bachelor digs he shares with his grandfather in Philadelphia when summoned to Atlantic City by his brother Jason's telegram, "Get your ass down here. The Kingdom is come." The "Kingdom" turns out to be but a revived version of a boyhood fantasy: to take over Tiki island, one of the Hawaiian archipelago, build a casino and amass a fast fortune. The Staebler brothers spend the rest of the film trying to subsidize the dream...
Rafelson's raw materials are first rate: sensitive acing (except for Julie Anne Robinson). Lazlo Kovacs's cinematography, a glib sharp-tongued script. But he Jumps them together without logic or order. The "no exit" situation would seem well suited to psychic drama. But Rafelson leaves unexplored Nicholson's talent for tempestuousness and dwells in a tone of wistful resignation. The problem again is Rafelson's self-conscious world-weariness. He shows Nicholson improvising in the bathroom. "The form of the tragic autobiography is dead. I have chosen radio...because my life is hopefully, comically unworthy." If this...
David (Jack Nicholson) is a late-night radio monologuist. Shy, self-absorbed to the point of obsession, he is a kind of FM Buddy Glass who rummages through his memories and fantasies looking for an always elusive epiphany. This odd, irresistibly fascinating film begins with one of his stories. "I promised to tell you why I never eat fish," David says to his radio audience, embarking on a desultory saga about how, years before, he and his brother Jason conspired to kill their grandfather with a piece of breaded sole and become "accomplices forever." The old man is very much...
...although both writer and director are often guilty of using the same kind of tin-ear dialogue and trite image that David himself might employ in one of his tortuous monologues. One of Rafelson's most certain talents is a nearly preternatural instinct for working with actors, and Nicholson and Dern give consummate performances. In such diverse parts as the bemused attorney in Easy Rider, the laborer and fugitive musician in Five Easy Pieces, the tomcat of Carnal Knowledge, Nicholson has already displayed remarkable range. David, so thoroughly introverted, so tentative, is the most demanding role...
...talents can really unfold. He has an almost combustible uncertainty that shades Jason's assurance with doubt and intimations of defeat. Dern also moves Jason beyond the more obvious pyrotechnics to which the script has confined him, and the scene in which he embraces an embarrassed Nicholson is one of the best in the film. Rafelson may be too detached and dispassionate, but Dern and Nicholson never...