“What if this is as good as it gets?” Truly a haunting thought in summer 2021.
There are a bunch of lines from As Good As It Gets that have become part of my daily patter, and I am quite sure that I am the only person who knows that. SORRY, EVERYBODY.
(Good times, noodle salad.)
The most memorable scene in As Good As It Gets is when Shane Black, playing the shift manager at the restaurant, kicks out Jack Nicholson’s character Melvin… and the entire wait staff and clientele applaud. It’s a cathartic moment for anyone who ever put up with a hellspawn of a customer, and doubly so for anyone who has put up with a hellspawn of a customer who has decided to make your restaurant their daily haunt. (Narratively, Melvin is a Grade-A shitbag but Nicholson is so charismatic in the film that his bigotry and bad manners are easy to forgive or forget as viewers. So the scene is important because the applause reminds us that the other characters find him loathsome.)
Across 20+ service industry jobs, I had my share of nightmare customers, but the true villains in my experience were restaurant owners. A bad customer destroys an hour of your life. A bad owner affects every minute of your life while you work for them. The food service industry is built upon sub-minimum wages to keep prices low and profits high (think about the dollar menu), and these starvation wages are subsidized by the customer tipping 20 percent above the cost of every meal and drink.
I’m not here to talk shit on service industry workers, who are the backbone of our economy and who are overworked, underpaid, and undervalued. It is the owners of their restaurants who can fuck right off.
We pulled up to a restaurant recently and went to the door, only to find it locked despite being well within the posted hours. There was a sign taped to the door that said “we are closed today due to lack of staffing.” This is where we are in 2021. This is how far we’ve skewed the power dynamic toward management and ownership that they will pay wages at which no one will or should work and then will close the restaurant and blame the workforce when turnover is high and openings go unfilled. You’re a business owner in a capitalist country, honey. If the wage that you set is too low and the chances of COVID infection are correspondingly too high, no one will take the job. The next step is increasing the wage (and increasing ventilation and safety) until you find employees. The next step is not to shut down the restaurant and point fingers at strawmen. You’re the fuckin’ owner. You want people to work, you have to provide a competitive wage. Don’t say “I can only pay $9 per hour” when Sheetz is offering $15 per hour plus benefits and when you’re double-parked across handicap spaces out front in a Lexus SUV. Raise prices if you must to make the numbers work (god forbid the shareholders don’t see expected profits), but don’t be the guy in the hot dog costume.
Back to As Good As It Gets. Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear are incredible in this movie. They have been the reason that I go back to this movie over the years, despite the amount of vitriol spewed by Melvin for most of the film. There were not many sympathetic gay figures in media available at that time, certainly not out in the country. Kinnear’s Simon was striking in his normalness (Melvin’s jokes notwithstanding), in stark contrast to how gay characters were usually portrayed in mainstream movies and TV. Hunt won an Academy Award for this in the same year that she won an Emmy for Mad About You, so she was in the zone. Her character Carol here is at her wit’s end, exhausted, using all of her energy to be good at her serving job. Her son’s respiratory illness is shown to be financially devastating in the film because of their lack of health insurance. It creates a vicious cycle in Carol’s life where they never get ahead, and Melvin’s casual fix of the situation is played for laughs (as it is solely so that Carol can return to the restaurant and so that Melvin is no longer barred), but from Carol’s point-of-view, this windfall is shocking: just a little money or stability can be transformative for a working class person.
Other 1997 candidates: Happy Together; The Fully Monty; Anaconda; Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery; Face/Off; Grosse Pointe Blank; In & Out; The House of Yes; Jackie Brown
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.