‘About Schmidt’

Jack Nicholson is convincing as a 66-year-old former insurance actuary who loses his wife and drives cross country in a Winnebago.   [R]

By: Elise Nakhnikian
   Citizen Ruth and Election proved that About Schmidt writer-director Alexander Payne is a champion — a champ with Woody Allen and Charles Dickens in his bloodline.
   Like Woody, he tells smart, funny stories set in his hometown, and he uses a core cast and crew supplemented by cannily chosen stars and character actors. Like Dickens, Payne and his co-writer, Jim Taylor, display a passion for social commentary, a genius for creating situations that are both realistic and absurd, and a talent for making us care about people we’d probably avoid in real life.
   About Schmidt has surface similarities to Payne’s first two movies. It takes place mainly in Omaha, Neb., and it features ordinary people and settings that aren’t often seen in Hollywood movies. But where the other two are solid gold, Schmidt has a hollow core.

"Jack
Jack Nicholson is at the end of his rope in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt.


   When we first see Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson), he’s sitting in a packed-up office, gazing like a stunned bird at a clock whose second hand is clicking slowly toward 12. As the audience realizes that Schmidt is too dutiful — or too unimaginative — to leave work a minute early even on his last day, people begin to snicker. Isn’t that funny? And aren’t we clever to see the humor in it?
   After plodding along on the same path for decades, Schmidt is beginning to lose his moorings. First he retires, and the hole he expected to leave behind him closes up almost instantly. Then his wife of 42 years dies, forcing him to re-evaluate a marriage he’d already begun to question.
   Meanwhile, his daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis), is getting ready to marry Randall (Dermot Mulroney), a dimwitted young man with a penchant for pyramid schemes and inspirational tapes. Energized by a conviction that he must "make the best of whatever time I have left," Schmidt makes it his mission to talk Jeannie out of the marriage. Unfortunately, she won’t listen.
   To pass the time before Jeannie’s wedding, he decides to take a road trip to places where he once lived, trying to recover lost memories. As he visits old haunts and then meets Randall’s alarming family, we wonder what Schmidt is thinking and feeling. The answer appears to be not much, apart from the despair he expresses in letters to Ndugu, a Tanzanian orphan he’s sponsoring.
   Much has been made of how Nicholson loses himself in the role. It’s not the first time the actor has played an overweight, unglamorous man, but it may be the first time he has played one so passive and depressed. He’s convincing as a 66-year-old former insurance actuary, making himself look both boxy and lumpy, like a bloated Tin Man. Still, it’s hard to forget that it’s Jack behind that stone-faced façade. The cocky showboat in him peeks out now and then, like when Schmidt makes an extended slapstick routine of getting into a waterbed, or when he celebrates his new widower’s freedom by urinating on the toilet seat — and the bathroom floor.
   The movie gets many things right. Jeannie’s anger at her father and his sadness about the distance between them come to life in a handful of visceral scenes. Kathy Bates is vividly funny as Randall’s mother, Roberta, the kind of overbearing woman who alienates people with her tactless, self-satisfied "honesty." Mulroney nails the sweetness beneath Randall’s peculiar hairdo, as well as his misplaced confidence and goofy optimism. And there’s real pathos when a kindhearted couple at an RV park invites Schmidt to dinner, sharing their family photo album before Schmidt’s desperate loneliness ruins the evening.
   Yet About Schmidt is ultimately unsatisfying. The characters speak in strings of clichés. The "Dear Ndugu" letters, which Nicholson reads in voice-overs, are a too-cute expository device, since even a man going through a belated midlife crisis would be unlikely to bare his soul to a 6-year-old child. Worst of all is the snickering the movie encourages, which is often directed at Schmidt. We giggle when he begins to collect Hummel figurines, or drives his 35-foot Winnebago to the grocery store, or urges Ndugu to "pledge a fraternity when you go to college," or talks to "a real Indian" and is amazed to learn that "those people got a raw deal!"
   Payne, who says he’s been influenced by Milos Forman, the Czech-born director of social satires like The Fireman’s Ball and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, clearly has things to say about American mores and morality. Citizen Ruth took on the loaded subject of abortion rights, lampooning zealots on both sides of the debate. Election is about the price people pay for unethical behavior. And About Schmidt is about the emptiness of a life devoted entirely to following the rules.
   But emptiness is a hard thing to portray on film. In telling this story, Payne and Taylor relied too much on satire and too little on sympathy. If they wanted us to care more about Schmidt’s existential crisis, they should have made us laugh less at his expense.
Rated R. Contains profanity and nudity.