Of all the things which are most difficult to intentionally create in the world of filmmaking, one ranks highest above them all. A filmmaker wants his audience to cry, they are going to cry. A filmmaker wants audiences to leave the theater in tears of laughter, many if not most if not all will be clutching at their gut after spending ninety minutes slapping their thighs. Especially in the world of 21st century movie magic, there is almost nothing that even a merely competent director cannot create from almost nothing through sheer will, a good helping of money and some very talented people all around. One element of filmmaking remains immune to coercion and force, however, and is still utterly dependent on pure random chance and good old-fashioned luck.
Chemistry! Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was written by one of the few truly legendary only-writers in Hollywood history, by which is meant he never really wanted to direct: William Goldman. It was helmed by a future Oscar-winning, future Cannes Film Festival winning, and future Directors Guild of America winner. Notably, two of those awards came courtesy of a film which just also happened to feature the two actors who played Butch and Sundance. Well, The Sting didn’t just happen to have Paul Newman and Robert Redford as its stars. Butch and the Kid were almost paired together in the form of:
Paul Newman and Steve McQueen
Dustin Hoffman and Jack Lemmon
Marlon Brando and Paul Newman (when film was still titled The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy)
Paul Newman and Warren Beatty
Robert Redford, in fact, was not even being considered for Sundance until Newman finally wore down the producers into hiring him. The rest, as they say, is history. But…would it still be the same history had any of those other casting variations played out as planned? It is a tremendous script and George Roy Hill was an exceptionally talented director, but one has to assume almost certainly not. Those would-be acting teams might well have equaled the chemistry that existed between Newman and Redford and almost certainly could have matched it on another set telling another story. But the smart money would be on the latter and not the former since the magic that somehow burst from the ether during the making of Butch and Sundance also came together on the set of The Sting. Hollywood history is written the way it is in part because of pure luck that proved to be something a little more.
Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn teamed up nine times. The best films of both their careers can arguably be attributed to Martin Scorsese collaborating with Robert DeNiro. Anyone who was watched The Nice Guys is bound to ask the same question: when are Gosling and Crowe going to reteam?
Here’s the deal: the storyline of The Nice Guys is probably better than any of the Lethal Weapon series and definitely better than any of the Rush Hour movies. But the plot is not what anyone ever talks about. They talk about the unlikely comedic chemistry which crackles on the screen between the proven funny guy Gosling and the “say what?” of Russell Crowe. Come on, be honest, when one thinks of Russell Crowe’s movie career it doesn’t usually produce a smile. The guy has turned in some of the most memorable dramatic performances of his era, but he’s not exactly known for losing out on roles to Jim Carrey.
But what really lifts The Nice Guys out of the mere buddy-movie/crime-comedy template into which many who’ve never seen it probably automatically place it is that the chemistry does not stop when Holland March and Jackson Healy go their separate ways for a few scenes. Unexpectedly, the movie is also memorable for its shockingly adept handling of a father/daughter relationship. The relationship here is between Holland and his daughter Holly and though it may seem out of place in a film set in the 1970’s, ultimately it fits in quite nicely with millennial postmodernism. There probably were many relationships like that between Holly and Holland going on between real fathers and daughters in 1977, especially in Los Angeles if not necessarily among a private detective and his offspring. That said, it definitely feels more like something that would be in a movie with a contemporary setting. The terrific thing is that despite seeming a little out of sync with the time period, the nature of the relationship fits and seems perfectly natural. At no point—probably because Holland March is such an offbeat character that one would naturally suspect him to raise an offbeat daughter—does the setting feel compromised. And it wouldn’t matter if it did because Angourie Rice—the actress playing Holly—almost seems to have been created fully formed out of the amazing chemistry displayed between the two stars.
The Nice Guys is a nice movie. In the sense that it doesn’t break any ground and it doesn’t revolutionize a genre or have a particularly original plot (though it does wind up digging deeper and spanning more broadly than one suspects at first). Much like Butch and Sundance, it is a movie that succeeds not just because of the snappy dialogue, but the fortunate casting of actors with the chemistry needed to actually make that dialogue snap. If only one could find a way to create chemistry between actors with as much ease as transforming almost any actor into an acceptable superhero.
