Melvin Udall is my favourite Jack Nicholson performance. He’s crass. He’s rude. He’s self-centered. He’s judgmental, arrogant, bigoted, racist, and sexist. Yet somehow, he’s loveable; maybe not the first go-around, but the more time you spend with him, the more loveable he becomes. And a big reason for that is he is all those negative adjectives I listed above, but he’s also not. Since I first watched this movie at twelve years old, he’s remained one of my favourite characters. Roger Ebert posited the idea that if Udall were played by any other actor, Melvin’s tirades would “bring the film to an appalled halt”. And it’s hard to argue with that insight. And it might be why I love this character so much.
Brace Yourself For Melvin
Brace Yourself For Melvin is the tagline of James L. Brooks’ charming film As Good As It Gets. It’s at the top of the poster in big, bold, blue letters. It’s not a clever tagline: it’s a warning to paying audiences. They sit in the theatre, the lights fall, and the curtain rises. Then they meet Melvin Udall, who immediately endears himself to the paying public by shoving a cute little dog down a garbage chute, and the film’s title appears while they listen, in shock or in horror, to the dog banging around and yipping in the darkness.
When his gay neighbor Simon (Greg Kinnear) asks Melvin if he’d seen Verdell, Melvin expresses that he thought Simon was talking about the coloured man he’d seen hanging around the hallway....the colour of thick molasses, in Melvin’s words. A moment later he tells Simon, “As long as you keep your work zipped up around me, I don’t give a rat crap what or where you shove your show. Are we done being neighbours for now?” He then ostensibly feigns reassurance that Simon will find his dog Verdell, adding, sarcastically, that he loves that dog. Simon retorts, quite accurately, “You don’t love anything, Mr. Udall.”
Yikes.
What a handshake.
The screenplay from Mark Andrus & James L. Brooks paints Melvin in such a blaring negative light in the first few minutes. How can any character recover from this? How is an audience supposed to spend two hours with, as Simon later sums Melvin up, “an absolute horror of a human being?” How can Melvin Udall possibly be redeemed in the eyes of the audience? That’s what Andrus and Brooks are asking the audience: can you find it in your heart to love Melvin Udall? Even a little? Just a smidgen?
Upon learning Melvin no doubt dropped Verdell down the chute, Simon confronts Melvin only for Melvin to shut him down with pure rancor and disdain in a very colourful tirade. Simon leaves and Frank (Cuba Gooding Jr.) knocks on Melvin's door and forcibly rips him out of his apartment to put the fear of God into him so he'll leave Simon alone. Melvin panics. He calls for help and the police and screams, “That’s assault and battery…and you’re black!” This is a moment where the cracks show in Melvin. We see that Melvin’s aggressive posturing conceals his cowardly, fearful existence.
When people say "I'm not racist; I hate everyone equally", it's a deflection. With Melvin, it's the absolute truth. He hates people, all people. He wants to be left alone – the racism, bigotry, and sexism ensures that. Anything more than perfunctory communication, like the transactional dialogue of giving your order or saying thank you to a cashier, is too much for Melvin; and I doubt he ever says 'thank you'. There is a twinkle in his eye when he insults and discriminates, not of malice, but of knowing he’s about to get exactly what he wants: you, out of his life – as quick as fucking possible.
Enter the Doggo
When his neighbour Simon is brutally assaulted in his home and Frank thrusts Verdell into Melvin’s apartment while Simon is in the hospital, Melvin says, “I can’t have a dog…no one’s ever been in here before!” He’s talking about his apartment, but also his life. How long has Melvin lived alone, unattached? Is he so hostile towards people because he’s a dick or is his hostility merely a symptom of bitter loneliness and past trauma? Is he trapped in a counterintuitive cycle of shoving people away because he’s afraid caring for them will lead to being wounded by them?
He greets Verdell in a gruff voice, “We don’t have no dog food here, we don’t want no dog food here: you’ll eat what we got!” And what Verdell gets is a dog bowl full of prime rib and bacon strips, a king’s meal. I wish people that didn’t want me in their house fed me prime rib. I’d never leave. And that’s actually what Melvin wants.
Verdell brings him so much joy simply from existing in proximity to him. Melvin was so lonely that it only took a few days with a dog to crack open his self-imposed prison, fastened with a foot of padlocks and weaponized barbs. When Simon returns home, he’s heartbroken to return Verdell. He plays piano, and cries, as the camera pans over to Verdell’s dish. “Over a dog,” he laughs to himself, incredulous, horrified. He is entering freefall. Speaking of freefall, I wonder if Melvin sees the irony of becoming so attached to a dog he held so little affection for he thought nothing of shoving it down the garbage chute.
The Disorder of the Orderly Disorder
He’s so distraught and vulnerable over Verdell that he marches down to his shrink’s office, barges into his office and screams, “Help!” He’s told to make an appointment and he protests, with one of the best lines of the film, “How can you diagnose someone with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and then act as if I had some choice about barging in?”
Melvin Udall suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a brilliant narrative choice. It doesn’t excuse Melvin’s behavior, but it provides a context for it; it also provides a lot of comedic visuals along the way. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” is enough to keep Melvin Udall from stepping on cracks, knocking people off their bikes as he charges to his shrinks office on a sidewalk full of cracks. We see him turn each lock five times. He has to touch his toes on each side of his slippers before putting them on. He has a medicine cabinet full of bars of soap, which he uses once, discards, and unwraps the next bar. He can’t touch anything anyone else has touched. He can only handle Verdell, a dog he loves, with plastic gloves or oven mitts. It must be exhausting. So why is he like this?
The film doesn’t explore his childhood at all, save for one scene, when he tries to win a misery contest over Simon, by saying “My father didn’t leave his room for 11 years. He used to hit me over the hands with a yard stick if I made a mistake playing the piano.” That provides quite a bit of context into his reclusive life and his standoffish persona. The strict piano teaching may have been what infected him with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, an unhealthy need for order and for things to be perfect and the same all the time, just like playing Chopin’s Nocturne #2 and fearing the wrath if he wasn’t perfect.
But what about his mother? Was she there? Did she die or leave? Did his father not leave his room because she’d died or left? To get Freudian about the Melvin…what was his mother like? Was she the only source of love and positive reinforcement in his life, or did he never get either of those things because she was absent for much or all of his life? There are no answers, of course. But the lack of answers could this explain his affection for…
Carol the Waitress
Carol the Waitress (Helen Hunt) would be a pretty good representation of whatever idealism Melvin had toward motherhood and a nurturing force. He sees the way she cares for her chronically sick son, Spencer, and the way she’s always put up with his shit at the restaurant. We get the sense she’d been waiting on him for years, yet it wasn’t until their first scene together in the film when she finally inquires what Melvin’s deal with plastic cutlery is. She’s so seemingly free of judgment or simply too polite to ever ask. Like Melvin, she is trapped by an exhausting routine that revolves around illness, but not her own. And unlike Melvin, she’d give almost anything to be free of her routine.
Carol is an important part of Melvin’s day: she serves him breakfast, the most important meal of the day! Her boss doesn’t like Melvin. Why? Because he chases away Jews from his usual table by saying things like “People who talk in metaphors oughta shampoo my crotch.” Her boss only tolerated Melvin for as long as he had because he’s a successful author, and because Carol the Waitress keeps him in line.
As an obsessive-compulsive, Melvin needs everything to be just so, and that includes people that serve very important functions, like serving him breakfast. It has to be Carol – because he loves her, though in the early stages of the film he’d never admit he was capable of love. But that damned dog! That damned dog wormed his way in and now that he has a taste, Melvin wants more. And on the day he needs Carol’s tenderness because Verdell went back home and his shrink brushed him off…she’s not at work. After being told Carol may be getting a job closer to home, he calls another waitress “Elephant Girl” and demands Carol, and he'll pay anything, but the owner kicks him out. Melvin protests. He needs Carol. “There’s been a disaster,” he pleads to the manager before he leaves to a chorus of cheers and applause. However, on the way out he bribes a busboy for Carol's last name.
His entire routine is decimated so Melvin naturally shows up at his usual waitress' house to ask why she wasn't at work to serve him breakfast. To Melvin, this is a normal response to solving the crisis of his orderly life becoming sheer anarchy. In her doorway, Melvin explains to Carol how important an issue it is to him that she be there to serve him eggs.
Carol: Do you have any control over how creepy you allow yourself to get?
Melvin: Yes I do, as a matter of fact.
Melvin discovers that her chronically ill son is why she missed work. This simply cannot be permitted. Later that day Melvin hatches a plan.
The Romancer
A fascinating element of Melvin Udall is the fact he is an incredibly successful romance author. We see him writing his latest romance during the fracas following Verdell’s ride down the chute and Carol’s boss informs us he’s successful. Other than that, Melvin being a writer is hardly touched on in the film, but it’s quite a key piece of information. Melvin’s plan to get Carol serving him eggs again is to ask his publisher to get Carol’s son better medical treatment than Carol can afford. After she agrees to help him, she says her son just got accepted into Brown, and he dismisses her immediately with insincere interest, and she walks away stupefied over how massive of a self-centred prick he is.
On his way out, the receptionist at his publisher’s office, who just intently watched the previous interaction, is literally swooning her in swivel chair at his presence. She is a massive fan of his books. You can see it on her face, in her body language. She’s practically already fucking him with her mind. She knows in her heart that a man who can make her feel how she does when she reads his work must be simply perfect. When he’s waiting for an elevator, she simply can’t contain it. She needs to talk with him.
Receptionist: You have no idea how much your work means to me.
Melvin (humouring her): What does it mean to you?
Receptionist: That somebody out there knows what it's like...
She stands and puts her hands across her heart and head
Receptionist: To be in here.
This is Melvin’s nightmare (as he audibly admits) and the receptionist bounces over to him as he hurries the elevator. She just wants to ask a couple questions.
Receptionist: How do you write women so well?
Melvin: I think of a man...
He has that twinkle in his eye, knowing he's about to ensure this woman doesn't look his way ever again.
Melvin: And then I take away reason and accountability.
And she is crushed. Like he snuffed out any chance for her to ever feel romance again. It’s like they say, Rita from Dexter…never meet your heroes!
So how does a man so cold and mean and utterly devoid of meaningful relationships (let alone meaningless relationships) write such great romance? Why is he unable to woo women as his books do? This scene establishes the folly of the second half of the film when it comes to Carol the Waitress, in how he says something so utterly romantic and perfect only to immediately spit on it with his next thought. Melvin Udall writes such perfect love so he can experience it for himself. If only reality were as easy to control and he could make people do what he wanted them to.
The Note
Carol naturally has many reservations about accepting Melvin’s major financial assistance when it comes to her son Spencer’s new medical care. She can’t reject his help, but she also has to make something clear to Melvin. She travels through the rain late at night and shows up at his doorstep, her wet shirt clinging tight to her skin (this was the heart of Hunt’s wet T-Shirt phase), to thank him. He immediately deflects her needs and emotions by telling her to put it in a note. She then expresses to Melvin that she will never ever sleep with him.
Melvin: I'm sorry, but we don't open for the 'no sex oaths' until nine a.m.
Carol agonizes over her thank you letter and hands it to him while he’s having lunch at the restaurant with Frank. He rejects the letter, the one he told her to write, by no thanks required. After torturing herself writing it, Carol is utterly floored. Melvin asks Frank to validate him. "Shouldn't saying no thanks be a good thing?"
“Yeah, and it looks like it went over well too,” Frank says, with a chuckle.
Melvin figuratively chases Frank away from that comment, but it brings to light the oddity of Melvin. How can a romance author, who is said to understand women so well, be so oblivious to Carol’s emotions? Shouldn’t he intuit she’s trying to connect emotionally with him, and shouldn’t that be the desired outcome if he loves her?
If As Good As It Gets is a love story, then we already know that Melvin and Carol will fall in love. But the question is how? Not how will they get together, but instead how could a woman like Carol (or any woman, for that matter) ever fall in love with a man like Melvin? The segment of the film that revolves around the note answers that.
Carol agonized over the note because she is incredibly lonely as well. She emotes to her mother how her entire life for years has been worrying about Spencer and taking care of him, that her son is basically making up for the fact that “his mother isn’t getting any”. We see a date of her fails miserably because her domestic responsibilities provided “a little too much reality for a Friday night.” Melvin needs Carol, even if it’s just to bring him eggs with a kind smile. And for Carol, it’s nice to be needed in that way. The note represents for Carol what Melvin’s books represent for him: the need for love, the only difference is that Carol needs to express herself to directly to Melvin, whereas Melvin can’t express his need to Carol.
Carol cries as she reads from her note about the scope of her gratefulness to Melvin for paying for her son's life-changing treatment. She expresses a thought similar to one Melvin expresses later in the movie, another sign of their similarities, but that's for part two. For now, Carol is emotionally vulnerable and affectionate.
This is Melvin’s chance…
Melvin: Now I want you to do something for me.
Oh no, Melvin! You could’ve said almost anything else! How are you so oblivious, you romantic wordsmith you?
The something Melvin needs done, the something he says she’s obligated to do (such a romantic, is Melvin), is to accompany him as he gives his "queer neighbour a lift to Baltimore" to ask his parents for money, since the assault has left Simon broke and broken. What reason does Melvin give? Does he say ‘you said you wanted to get out of the city’ or ‘you deserve a few days away’ or the riskier ‘I want to be with you'? No! He expresses he’s scared Simon is going to pull out "the old stiff one eye" on him, and needs Carol to chaperone.