Winter Dreams

By JAY COCKS

THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS

Directed by BOB RAFELSON Screenplay by JACOB BRACKMAN

THE IDEA OF THE GAME is to BUY and RENT or SELL properties so profitably that one becomes the wealthiest player and eventually WINS.

--Rules of Monopoly

"Hey, you ever notice how it's all Monopoly out there?" Jason Staebler asks his brother David from behind the bars of an Atlantic City jail. Now, nearly deserted in winter, long past its honky-tonk glory, Atlantic City survives like a huge, standing game board, residents and random vacationers wandering from Boardwalk to Park Place to Marvin Gardens like tokens moved at an idle throw of dice. It is simple enough, as the Staeblers will discover, to get out of jail. There is no way, though, out of the game.

David (Jack Nicholson) is a late-night radio monologuist. Shy, self-absorbed to the point of obsession, he is a kind of FM Buddy Glass who rummages through his memories and fantasies looking for an always elusive epiphany. This odd, irresistibly fascinating film begins with one of his stories. "I promised to tell you why I never eat fish," David says to his radio audience, embarking on a desultory saga about how, years before, he and his brother Jason conspired to kill their grandfather with a piece of breaded sole and become "accomplices forever." The old man is very much alive, of course; David lives with him still, until a message arrives from Jason in Atlantic City: "Get your ass down here. Our kingdom is come."

Jason (Bruce Dern) lives like some sleazy sultan, complete with a harem consisting of an aging, manic coquette (Ellen Burstyn) and her empty-eyed stepdaughter (Julie Anne Robinson). He is a wheeler-dealer in shopworn dreams, an anxious scam artist with a line of patter that makes him sound like one of Eugene O'Neill's drummers. David, ever skeptical, eventually lets himself be suckered in, more to demonstrate a kind of desperate solidarity with his brother than anything else. The scheme is an old Staebler fantasy: take over an island called Tiki in the Hawaiian archipelago, build a casino, rake in the bucks.

To subsidize this vacant dream, Jason has been acting as front man for a black mobster called Lewis (Benjamin "Scatman" Crothers) and doing some fast real estate shuffling with a couple of cavernous old hotels (It is very desirable to erect hotels on account of the very large rental...). Irretrievably second rate, hopelessly outsmarted by the black gangsters, Jason sees his dreams of glory collapse like one of the rotten piers along the ocean's edge (A player is bankrupt when he owes more than he can pay...).

Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson's previous film, was a good, sharply observed melodrama. The King of Marvin Gardens shows the same restrained, rhythmic editing and unemphatic camera movement, the same scrupulous care for dramatic nuance. Marvin Gardens may not be as successful as Five Easy Pieces; yet in many ways it is more interesting and certainly more daring --the work of a talented director trying to extend himself.

Rafelson and Scenarist Brackman understand their two played-out heroes without ever condescending to them, although both writer and director are often guilty of using the same kind of tin-ear dialogue and trite image that David himself might employ in one of his tortuous monologues. One of Rafelson's most certain talents is a nearly preternatural instinct for working with actors, and Nicholson and Dern give consummate performances. In such diverse parts as the bemused attorney in Easy Rider, the laborer and fugitive musician in Five Easy Pieces, the tomcat of Carnal Knowledge, Nicholson has already displayed remarkable range. David, so thoroughly introverted, so tentative, is the most demanding role he has had so far partly because it does not give him the chance to do what is easy for him --display sudden rage, ruthlessness, a casual, cunning kind of cool. Here, wearing a slowly unraveling cardigan and squinting nervously behind a pair of glasses forever smudged with fingerprints, Nicholson invests David with real turmoil and vulnerability.

For nearly a decade, Dern has been playing featured parts in everything from The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant to The Cowboys, and this kind of apprenticeship has taught him how to turn a scene with a shrug or an inflection. Now, with the rich role of Jason, Dern's talents can really unfold. He has an almost combustible uncertainty that shades Jason's assurance with doubt and intimations of defeat. Dern also moves Jason beyond the more obvious pyrotechnics to which the script has confined him, and the scene in which he embraces an embarrassed Nicholson is one of the best in the film. Rafelson may be too detached and dispassionate, but Dern and Nicholson never are.

.Jay Cocks

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