Living it up as death stalks

IN the midst of filming The Bucket List, Jack Nicholson took time out to attend last year's Academy Awards ceremony in LA.

Nicholson's presence has become part of Oscar tradition down the years. Assuming he has not been nominated, he'll sit in a prominent spot at the Kodak Theatre, grin indulgently whenever a joke is lobbed his way and then maybe go on to score at the after-show party. He's the tuxedoed equivalent of the ravens in the Tower of London: a sign that everything is basically hunky-dory.

All of which made his 2007 appearance so peculiarly terrifying. The camera swept across the crowd to freeze, as if in shock, on a Jack Gone Bad, shaven-skulled and bloated amid the rows of beautiful people.

He looked like some corrupted Hollywood Bacchus, the monster at the feast. The fact that he was still sporting his trademark combination of sunglasses and dickie-bow only added to the impression of a world tipped suddenly off its axis, an Oscar twilight zone in which one key element is crucially out of joint.

If only the end product were half as troubling, half as anarchic as the scenes it spawned that night. Sadly it is not to be. Skip forward a year and The Bucket List stands revealed as a silly, fraudulent little buddy comedy that is at times curiously enraging in its depiction of the joys of terminal cancer.

The official tagline is: "When he closed his eyes, his heart was opened." But I'm betting this was only after the makers gave serious thought to: "He laughed himself to death." Or even: "He learned some important lessons while the tumour ate his brain." The Bucket List is that kind of movie.

Nicholson plays Edward Cole, a bilious, coffee-loving billionaire with only six months left to live.

Morgan Freeman plays Carter Chambers, a soulful, family-loving car mechanic with only six months left to live. Together, they light out for one last big blow-out before the curtain comes down, effortlessly disproving Dorothy Parker's remark about there being no such thing as a happy ending.

Carter has written a "bucket list" of things to do before he dies, and Edward is on hand to first spice it up and then fund the activities from his own copious pocket.

Before you know it, the pair are off skydiving over the American desert, barrelling around a racetrack in vintage cars, and waxing lyrical in front of the pyramids - the biggest tombs of them all.

For a brief moment I thought Rob Reiner's film might actually be OK. The early, shaven-headed segments are far and away the best, as Nicholson - all glamour gone - vomits into his toilet bowl or is seen ignominiously taped, tubed and twitching as he undergoes a brain operation under general anaesthetic (shades of his indelible ECT session in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

Then these glimmers of mortality are swept under the carpet in favour a boisterous globe-hopping jaunt in the manner of Wild Hogs.

Sure, Carter's catheter springs a leak at one stage, but no matter. Two scenes later, they're off on an African safari and laughing like morons.

Need we point out how implausible the whole thing is? Would a billionaire executive really wind up in the same hospital ward as a working-class mechanic? (Justin Zackman's script performs all kinds of somersaults to assure us that he would.) Would a pair of terminally ill old men honestly have the energy to climb the Himalayas?

All of this would be pure agony were it not for the performances. It's not as if either role provides much of a challenge.

Freeman again finds himself installed as the sad-eyed emblem of American integrity (for good measure he is coaxed into performing another of those lullaby voice-overs he can probably recite in his sleep these days).

Nicholson, for his part, is in trusty As Good As It Gets mode as the cantankerous old goat who learns to think about someone other than himself for a change. Both men could have easily got away with faxing in their performances down a long-distant phone line (possibly from a kiosk beside the pyramids). Yet both tackle the task with, if not relish exactly, then a certain dogged, decent efficiency.

It's hard not to feel a grudging affection for Nicholson at times like these. There he is at the start, shuffling about in a shapeless smock, with his mottled bald dome and a livid scar above one ear (the sort of physical requirements that would surely make Tom Cruise throw his hands up in horror).

There he is at the end, almost making us believe in a hackneyed scene in which he belatedly makes peace with his estranged adult daughter.

In this regard, he is so different from Marlon Brando, his late neighbour up on Mulholland Drive.

Brando, too, made all kinds of trash in later years - but his contempt was plain to see.

In attempting to distance himself from each farrago, he would take a bad film and make it worse, as though this was somehow proof of his incorruptible artistic nature. Nicholson, by contrast, takes a bad film and makes it better.

He takes its dumb contrivances and plays them like they're spun gold, or the cat dung that produces the rare Sumatran coffee beans that Edward brews for breakfast. It is not enough, of course; it rarely is. But it at least it is humane - a drip-fed palliative on the long, dying crawl towards the credits.