A romantic comedy is supposed to give you someone to fall for. As Good as It Gets opens, more or less, with a man dropping a small dog down a garbage chute. That Melvin Udall — bigot, shut-in, obsessive-compulsive novelist — ends the picture as someone you actually want to see loved is the whole trick of James L. Brooks’s film, and the reason it still plays so warmly almost three decades on.

The engine is three people who have no business repairing one another. Jack Nicholson‘s Melvin, Helen Hunt’s exhausted waitress Carol Connelly and Greg Kinnear’s gentle, wounded painter Simon Bishop circle each other across a few blocks of Manhattan until their separate loneliness collides into something close to a family. Hold them together and you have one of the most quotable, best-acted American comedies of the 1990s.

The setup

Melvin writes best-selling romance novels and cannot stand another living person. He eats at the same table every day, brings his own plastic cutlery, and insults everyone within range. Then his gay neighbour Simon is beaten half to death in a robbery, and Melvin is strong-armed into minding the man’s Brussels griffon, Verdell. The dog is the wedge.

Through that small, undignified favour, Melvin is pried — painfully — into the lives of Carol, the only waitress who will still serve him, and Simon, whose career and confidence are in ruins. The film simply watches a man relearn how to be in a room with other people.

Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt in As Good as It Gets (1997) — As Good as It Gets (1997)

Brooks’s classical comedy of manners

Brooks, who built a career on television’s most humane comedy and would later help create The Simpsons, shoots this like a stage play in the best sense: rooms, tables, doorways, two people and a problem. There is nothing showy in John Bailey’s photography or Hans Zimmer’s light, unobtrusive score — the craft is all in the timing and the writing.

The Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks screenplay runs like a Swiss watch, each scene setting a small charge that pays off two scenes later, and it hands Nicholson some of the most repeatable insults in modern studio comedy.

Two Oscars, and why they landed

The Academy gave Nicholson Best Actor and Hunt Best Actress, and for once the double win is hard to argue with. Nicholson plays cruelty as a kind of armour and lets it crack by millimetres — the famous “You make me want to be a better man” lands precisely because he has spent two hours refusing every softer note.

Hunt matches him without a single grandstanding scene, grounding the whole thing in a working mother’s fatigue. Kinnear, Oscar-nominated for the part, is the quiet third leg, absorbing Melvin’s homophobia and slowly disarming it. In all the film took seven Academy Award nominations and three Golden Globes.

What it gets right, and what it plays safe

It is not a daring film. Roger Ebert admired the dialogue and the observation yet noticed that Brooks is “not quite willing to follow them down unconventional paths” — the hard edges of mental illness, prejudice and class get sanded toward a reassuring close. A romance between a misanthrope in his sixties and a waitress half his age is asked to carry more than it entirely can. This is comfort food made with real skill, not a film that wants to unsettle you.

The verdict

What endures is the acting and the talk. Few comedies hand two performers this much room and watch them fill it so completely, and few are this confident that an unapologetically unlikable man can still earn a happy ending. It plays it safe, but it plays it beautifully — As Good as It Gets remains one of the warmest and sharpest star vehicles of its decade.