Today is Nick Nolte's birthday. Rather than be all shocked about the fact that he's still having birthdays (cats who drive drunk and fucked on GHB tend to elicit that kinda response) let's instead celebrate the greatest thing Nick Nolte was ever part of: 48 Hrs.
Make no mistake, Nick Nolte fucking owns shit in 48 Hrs. Everybody remembers it as Eddie's big breakout vehicle, and while it's true, Eddie's amazing in 48 Hrs, Nick Nolte is awesome enough that it raises the bar for Eddie: “Oh, you think you're going to be awesome in this movie? Well I'm 21 years old and essentially a sentient testicle, I WILL COMPETE WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKER.” That's acting, Gary.
What makes 48 Hrs so brilliant is that, unlike every other mismatched partner movie (yes, including Lethal Weapon) that followed, it had the balls to make Nick Nolte a total, balls-out fucking racist. He claims, later in the movie, that he was just saying the shit that he did (calling Eddie a spearchucker, making cracks about watermelons, with the coup de grace “One thing you should know about me, nigger, I fight dirty” before suckerpunching him) to wind Eddie up. Eddie doesn't totally buy it, nor should be; you get the feeling that Eddie eventually warms up to Nick Nolte out of a sort of exasperated awe at just what a fucking asshole he is.
That might sound odd, except for the fact that any transcendant state of being is inherently interesting, even the state of being a transcendant fucking asshole. This is a harder level of existence to attain than one might think at first glance. For example, I'm an asshole; I'm loud, I curse too much, I shoot first and ask questions later emotionally. But ultimately, I'm harmless, since I mean well, and when I find out that some asshole-y thing I've said offends someone I'm genuinely contrite and I apologize. A fucking asshole doesn't really care, or at least not enough to stop. Nick Nolte takes that and runs with it (for a couple feet before he starts wheezing from all the cigarettes), creating, in 48 Hrs lead Jack Cates, perhaps the biggest prick “good guy” in the history of cinema.
Director Walter Hill stages a pretty impressive long take right toward the beginning of the picture, where Nick Nolte arrives at the cop shop to find all hell breaking loose—cops yelling, shoving perps around, general bedlam—and has a few conversations with other cops, concluding with Nick Nolte begin hauled into irate lieutenant Frank MacRae's office. Walter Hill is enough of a mensch that doing something difficult and badass just for the sheer fuck of it would be an acceptable explanation, but here this long take serves another purpose. It shows, in a couple random conversations where he's not even really all that pissed off, what a swaggering fucking asshole Nick Nolte is. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying he's not awesome (he is), but holy Christ is he a dick. The uninterrupted take is a great way of showing “oh no, I'm not using editing or lighting or anything, Nick Nolte's just a grumpy, growly fuck in this movie.” The use of cinema vocabulary as exposition in a nutshell, kids.
Of course, if Nick Nolte's the good guy, the bad guy has to be an even bigger twat, and 48 Hrs has a humdinger. James Remar, like Nick Nolte, has his finest hour in this picture as uberbaddie Ganz, who takes an almost sexual delight in blowing holes in people with guns. This is noted by the hooker he hires toward the beginning; the movie makes an excellent point out of her being way way way way too attractive to be a run-of-the-mill hooker (she's the white girl world record holder in the Ass Olympics, for one) and unsubtly showing how little James Remar could give a fuck, while even more unsubtly showing the utter joy he takes in shooting cops. This, of course, is not right. And this, amazingly, is how someone can be an even bigger asshole than Nick Nolte in this movie: James Remar is a rude, snarling, poorly socialized shitbag even when he isn't killing cops.
One of the most interesting things about 48 Hrs to me has always been its pace. One associates cop movies with having super fast pace, racing ahead like a patrol car with its siren on. 48 Hrs certainly doesn't drag by any means, and I want to be perfectly clear that in saying the picture feels like it's two hours long even though it's about an hour thirty five I am not saying that it's slow paced. It's simply a very dense movie, with several very tense set pieces that stretch time because they expand in the moment; their grandeur exceeds their physical size. The main one is, of course, the scene where Eddie tears the redneck bar a new asshole. (Warning, clip is NSFW because everything awesome is NSFW)
This is the most famous scene in the picture for a very good reason: Eddie rules to a degree you need really sophisticated equipment to calculate. But the reason he's given the space to do so is that Nick Nolte allows himself to become a secondary character for the whole thing. A less secure actor would be worried about some 21 year old punk comedian coming in and hogging the show, but Nick Nolte was like, “ya know what, fuck it, let's see what happens when I just hang out at the bar and don't pull focus.” A less secure actor would have gotten all up in Walter Hill's shit and demanded some kind of increased role in the scene. But no, Nick Nolte sits back and lets his co-star kick fucking ass. Sure, this sounds like congratulating someone for not kicking a puppy, but fuck it. It's his birthday.
Also, playing the straight man is a lot harder than just standing there while the funny dude is funny. The funny dude needs to be fed energy, but not too much, because the straight man can't pull focus. It's amazing that Nick Nolte does all the crazy shit that he does in this, like running around with long (and damn luxurious for such a macho dude) hair and chainsmoking and hitting his fucking flask while driving and doing so as a fucking cop and basically acting like a goddamn Bukowski character . . . and he still manages to do so subtly enough to fulfill his duties as a straight man. Of course, him so perfectly embodying the grouchy, jowly, square-ass white dude gives Eddie the freedom to be the equal and opposite reaction as a witty, fit, stylish black guy. The fact that Eddie gives the greatest debut performance in movies since Orson Welles is only partly because Eddie's awesome: give Nick Nolte some credit for throwing those batting practice fastballs right in Eddie's sweet spot so he could knock the fuckers out of the park.
The success of 48 Hrs—and the fact that the hard-drinking fuck-you lifestyle wasn't just getting in character—led to Nick Nolte playing a lot of this type of dude. Periodically he'd branch out and play a civilian, but it was always hard to buy him as a normal dude who isn't one ill-fated round of shots away from drinking himself to death. Like Cape Fear. Cape Fear arguably works better with Bobbert playing the good guy and Nick Nolte playing the fucked up psycho. Bobbert gave one large, entertaining performance in that picture, but if we're being real, swapping parts is the bolder choice. Lorenzo's Oil makes more sense if oil is a euphemism for booze and the poster is Nick Nolte holding a glass of scotch and smiling with the subtitle “His kid had a horrible, fatal, and unique disease . . . so Daddy decided to get fuckin drunk.” The Prince of Tides doesn't even count because Babs only casts guys so she can cut their balls off (see Bridges, Jeff in The Mirror Has Two Faces), and she also has to hold open calls of thousands of dudes to see who can keep a straight face when they call her a “beautiful woman,” giving her an extremely limited selection of guys to pick from.
That Neil Jordan remake of Bob Le Flambeur he was in wasn't bad, but seriously, casting Nick Nolte as a junkie is kinda lazy. Even if he isn't actually smacked out on the day you're shooting, it ain't gonna take much for him to convey that. Homeboy fucking worked it in The Hulk (the Ang Lee one); me and my buddy were like “Is he awesome because we drank all that tequila? Probably.”
This all might be taken to mean that Nick Nolte isn't awesome and a blast to watch in his pictures. This is not what this should all be taken to mean. Nick Nolte is always a delight to watch. He was even watchable in that horrible Sidney Lumet movie where he goes to fuck the guy in the ass and then strangles him, Q&A. He's a classic case of an actor who does one thing brilliantly well; this isn't a bad thing, if you do one thing brilliantly that beats the fuck out of doing several things kind of all right. When he's not quixotically pretending to be a civilian, Nick Nolte is a Hall of Famer, because no one (at all, ever) is better at being drunk and pissed off in a movie. Not even Harvey Keitel. And so, on his birthday, let us salute him in the proper fashion, by raising a glass.
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