Wow. That was my first reaction as the credits rolled as I sat there, stunned and pretty much close to tears. Director Alexander Payne (Election) returns with a quite superb bittersweet comedy with a performance from Jack Nicholson to rival any of his career peaks so far. He plays Warren R. Schmidt, a 66 year old recently retired actuary from Omaha, Nebraska. Relieved of his working routine, which for so many years as part of the same company has thus far been the core of his life, he finds himself living a life devoid of all enjoyment and stimulation.
Alone with his wife, whose every move and habits he despises, his retirement becomes a cycle of TV and restaurant visits. Pretty soon however, his life is thrown into even more turmoil as he returns home to find his wife dead. Worse still, his only daughter is now living in another state and is engaged to redneck waterbed salesman Randall. The film then follows Schmidt�s initial descent into near-breakdown levels of despair as he loses control, takes off in his Winnebago and revisits his youth. Finally coming to his senses, he makes for his daughter�s wedding to attempt to talk her out of a marriage he believes will be a big mistake, an opinion reinforced when he is put-up by his future in-laws, notably the mother of the house Roberta (Bates), twice divorced, painfully blunt, and quite simply hilarious.
In a recent interview with Jack Nicholson he claimed that at his time of life there was a scarcity of good roles being offered and that he had long-since given up making movies for the sake of it, now he is only tempted by scripts that really make him sit up and think. After a great turn in the Sean Penn directed The Pledge, this is a wonderful role for him. He plays it wonderfully, a look of loneliness and despair etched across his face throughout, truly believable in a part that is as unflattering as they come; for the most part he looks like a vagrant, unshaven, shabbily-dressed, flabby, tragically combed-over hair. Kathy Bates too is brilliant and I only wish her character had played a bigger part overall. Payne�s direction also gets applause for the way he captures Nicholson�s facial expressions and knows exactly how long to linger on them. What is quite inspired too is the way he uses the recital of Schmidt�s letters to his adopted Tanzanian child Ndugu as a way into his inner thoughts, which are often hilarious.
It�s a great film and highly deserving of any awards it may receive along the way. As an undercurrent there is a dig at the whole concept of the American Dream, and Warren Schmidt is pretty close to being Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, the retired family man who never quite fulfilled the ambition forced upon him by his own culture and is destined to remain a failure in his own state-conditioned eyes, the man who, in striving to provide for his family, has ended up forgetting their importance. There are parts where you don�t know whether to laugh or cry (Schmidt caking his face in his recently deceased wife�s moisturising cream) and the whole movie is equal parts laugh out loud funny and achingly sad and moving. Great stuff. |
