Every 5 years since I was a teenager, I keep waiting to find out if this is the half-decade when As Good As It Gets stops aging well. We're all used to Jack Nicholson cuckoo-ness, and he's only just a more charming version of a cuckoo (why did this bird get a mental health association? a rabbit hole for another day) in this movie with his "You Make Want To Be a Better Man" line that floored everyone who has ever been a sucker for earnestness. I read someone recently describe earnestness as the cynic's kryptonite. AGAIG is a movie where the cynical Nicholson's kryptonite was inside his own self all along.
I find hope in a place like that, in a person like that. The central character of this movie however was Helen Hunt. It was her era. In this movie, she wasn't necessarily a cynic. She was tired.
The tired-to-cynic transformation is far too short; all too familiar to anyone looking at a World Mental Health Day poster in 2025.
There's a scene in the movie where a doctor that Nicholson set up to look after Hunt's sick kid (Hunt's a waitress in the movie with terrible healthcare access—we've all seen how THIS has aged since 1997 in the U.S.) tells her that under his care her son's going to "feel a whole lot better." It's perhaps the first time in the entire movie that we see her take an actual breath into her lungs.
I have been living in a sick body for the entirety of this year in way that I never expected to. I've known terrible sicknesses before, but nothing so.. relentless in its pursuit of overthrowing my empire of resilience.
I keep waiting for a doctor to tell me my son(g) is going to start feeling a lot better soon. That beautiful piece of dialogue hasn't yet been written.
But perhaps, in this half-decade of watching this soft-lens, fuzzy garden of a movie, I change the screenplay. Maybe I allow myself breathe before doctors tell me things. Maybe that's already a whole lot better.
I make me want to be a better man.
