Chinatown - Characters & Cast

Initially, his motivation is professional: solving a case for a client. This quickly shifts to a personal quest for the truth after he realizes he's been set up and Hollis Mulwray is murdered. His motivation becomes increasingly complex as he develops feelings for Evelyn and a desire to protect her, driven by a need to atone for a past failure in Chinatown. Ultimately, he is motivated by a stubborn, if futile, sense of justice.

Jake Gittes begins as a cynical but successful private eye, profiting from the dirty secrets of others. He is slick, confident, and seemingly in control. As the Mulwray case unfolds, his professional detachment crumbles. He is drawn into a conspiracy far deeper and darker than he could have imagined, forcing him to confront true evil. His journey is one of disillusionment; his attempts to impose order and achieve justice not only fail but lead to tragedy. He ends the film a broken man, stripped of his confidence and forced to accept his own powerlessness in a corrupt world.

Evelyn's sole motivation is the protection of her daughter, Katherine, from her monstrous father, Noah Cross. Every lie she tells and every action she takes is driven by the desperate need to keep Katherine safe and to escape her father's corrupting influence. This singular, powerful motivation drives her to her tragic end.

Evelyn is initially presented as a classic femme fatale: mysterious, wealthy, and potentially deceitful. Her character arc is a tragic revelation of the truth behind this facade. She is not a perpetrator of deceit, but a victim of a horrific, lifelong trauma—incestuous abuse by her father. Her secretive and erratic behavior is revealed to be a desperate attempt to protect her daughter/sister, Katherine. She evolves from a suspect in Gittes's eyes to the film's ultimate tragic figure, a woman destroyed by the very evil she has spent her life trying to escape.

Cross is motivated by an insatiable hunger for power and control, which he equates with owning "the future." His desire for wealth through the water scheme is secondary to his obsession with controlling the destiny of Los Angeles. His motivation also extends to a perverse and possessive desire to control his family, specifically to reclaim his daughter/granddaughter, Katherine, whom he sees as the continuation of his legacy.

Noah Cross has no redemptive arc; he is the embodiment of absolute corruption and pure evil from beginning to end. He presents a veneer of folksy charm and respectability, which only makes his underlying monstrosity more chilling. As the film progresses, the depths of his depravity are revealed—not only is he the mastermind behind the water conspiracy and a murderer, but he is also an unrepentant rapist who abused his own daughter. He remains in power at the end, having gotten everything he wants, representing the triumph of evil over good.

Hollis is motivated by his professional ethics and a sense of public duty. He is determined to prevent the construction of a dangerous dam and to expose the illegal dumping of the city's water. He is also motivated by a desire to protect Evelyn and Katherine from Noah Cross, having discovered the true nature of his father-in-law's plans.

Hollis Mulwray is a largely unseen but pivotal character whose integrity sets the plot in motion. He is a principled engineer who discovers the corrupt water scheme and opposes a new dam he knows is unsafe, alluding to a past disaster he feels responsible for. His character does not have an arc in the traditional sense, as he is murdered early in the film. Instead, he functions as the moral compass whose death exposes the deep-seated corruption Gittes must investigate. His entire presence is defined by his honesty in a dishonest world.