Jack Nicholson’s Final Role

How Do You Know was released in theaters December 2010.

My mother had just begun her battle with cancer. I was still working at Borders. My niece wasn’t born yet, but she was developing in uterus. 

And this was Jack Nicholson’s final film. It was also James L. Brooks’s final film.

I’m watching it for the first time as I write this. I lost track of Nicholson’s career, how long ago it ended. He’s 84 now, so he retired from acting in his 70s. Watching him in How is actually strange; even though I had seen him in plenty of movies from around that time, including one of my all-time favorites, The Departed, from four years earlier, he clearly seems older. It’s not hugely surprising that he decided he was done. He goes for the usual Nicholson gusto, but doesn’t really have it anymore. And it’s even a pretty small part. He plays at least fourth banana behind leads Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson (all three known for being extremely likable, and living up to it), and arguably behind even Kathryn Hahn, who at this point was still building her career of stealing scenes in supporting roles.

Nicholson famously dominated the screen. That was his whole thing. He wasn’t by any stretch a conventional leading man, but he ascended assuredly up the Hollywood ladder in the ‘70s until he was his own genre. Somehow he seemed like he’d do it forever, and then he was just gone. And he’s stayed gone for more than a decade.

How was received as a minor rom com, of little note. No one knew it would be Nicholson’s last film, although if you read between the lines you can tell Brooks knew it was his last. And probably even as he was filming, Nicholson did, too. 

The problem with a lot of critics is that they all too often take their job for granted. Witherspoon infuses her performance with the kind of determination to prove herself beyond the Legally Blonde reputation she had theoretically achieved with the Oscar win for Walk the Line, but she knew as well as anyone that when a mainstream leading actress wins one of those, it’s basically a gimme, and nobody really expects anything “good” from them again. And Rudd is Rudd, and Wilson of course is Wilson, which is to say reliably watchable. Rudd still gets taken for granted a decade later, and yeah, so does Wilson.

The thing about movies is that once an initial reception has been registered, it’s very hard to change (even cult films never really break out of cult status). I’m not saying that just because it’s Nicholson’s (and Brooks’) final film, you should consider it, I don’t know, a classic. But it didn’t deserve to be dismissed in 2010, and it does deserve a look in 2021. It’s a good movie with a great cast. But yeah, it’s now got a distinct historic sheen to it, and is well worth the effort of appreciating it for that.