I laughed, I cried. Seriously, I did.
Written: Dec 14 '02 (Updated Dec 14 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A razor wit with a smooth delivery. Brilliant Nicholson, cast, and screenplay.
Cons: For me, none. For some, possibly slowish pace.
The Bottom Line: Not as funny as Election (same team), but certainly more minutely observed and bittersweet. Nicholson pares down, and the rest of the cast perform marvelously. Rich and rewarding.
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| trust12345's Full Review: About Schmidt |
General: "About Schmidt" is a melancholic comedy, American road trip for one, coming of old age story that will tickle the little bone in your cerebellum that is lodged between Pathos and Guffaw. Jack Nicholson widdles his iconic antics down to a perfect, minutely enacted performance of a recent retiree coming to grips with life after insurance sales and the death of his wife. Set in Omaha, it traces his story through quiet despair to an epiphany that is irony proof and eminently affirming. In its deadpan observation of the ordinary, it uncovers layers of emotion and comically strange that give this film a poignant buzz throughout, even as you laugh. Director Alexander Payne, who brought us the masterpiece of political satire with "Election" and the spoof of anti-abortion and pro-choice manipulators ("Citizen Ruth"), teams up again with screen writer Jim Taylor to tackle the peculiar land that is the American Midwest. In truth, I preferred "Election" mainly for its brilliance as an out and out comedy, but "About Schmidt" is a far more affecting and balanced film. If you don't have time to peruse the longer form of this review, let me cut to the chase: I highly recommend the film. It is a rare work of art that can blend humor and existential crises so seamlessly and subtly that we can deeply feel without sentimentality, and laugh hard without feeling we have merely been entertained.
"About Schmidt" opens with a sequence of 90 degree angle shots that rotate centering on a monolithic, gray office building, and then move to the interior of an office cubicle, where the camera again not so much encircles an aged man, but squares him. The effect obliterates sensuality and spontaneity, underscoring the bleak routine of this man's life. But this routine is on the verge of being shattered forever: he is retiring, and he watches very patiently, dogmatically, for the clock on the wall to hit 5:00. Looking compact and chastened (think of Willy Loman at the end of a very long day), the man gets up, takes a final glance at the interior of his office, piled high with boxes, and shuts off the light after a last, lingering gaze.
The scene is unusual for a number of reasons. One of them is that it is so normal and quotidian, we become aware that this kind of scene is not shown often in movies, certainly not as a first scene, and not at this slow pace. But think of how many people have gone through this moment, are experiencing it now, and will in the future. There is no music to clue us into an emotion, no dialogue, just a plain man bidding farewell to a very plain room. I felt an uncanny pathos in this supremely normal ritual, and that is one of the many gifts of this movie. Payne confers pathos onto ordinary things we take for granted. More stunning yet, he continues to extract pathos from the ordinary even when, later in the film, he simultaneously finds within it boundless humor.
Another unusual thing about the opening scene is that the Everyman in the drab office is Jack Nicholson. One might think (that is, I would think) Nicholson's iconic screen image, not to mention recent propensity for overusing his trademark grin and eyebrows, would overshadow the unprepossessing character Payne, co-screenwriter Jim Taylor, and novelist Louis Begley, had in mind. But Nicholson is superbly understated, and we are rarely forced out of the movie to recall anything else in his long, illustrious career. He does a phenomenal job of losing himself in his character, Warren Schmidt.
Schmidt is at the center of nearly every shot, and we begin to view the world through his eyes. We start to feel, with him, like him, that he is trapped in a life of long-ago expired expectations and hopes, and in a marriage that is cruising toward nowhere, with his wife at the wheel. He slips away from his depressing retirement party to have a drink alone at the bar in the next room. His redundancy, even obsolescence is established the next day, when, visiting his old office, we see that the young insurance salesman who has replaced him has immediately decorated it, and trashed all of Schmidt's files and boxes. Schmidt's life crisis is summed up in his disappointed but resigned stare at the discarded boxes: Is this what my life amounts to? Have I made any difference?
Schmidt's wife (played by June Squibb), is about as ordinary a citizen as I have ever seen on screen. Devoted to cleanliness and the morally antiseptic, she has decorated their quintessentially suburban Omaha home with QVC-style gew-gaws, figurines ("Hummels" as Schmidt later calls them), and ruffle-fringed pillows and curtains. Her final words in life, uttered as she vacuums the carpet with powder and as her husband goes off to mail a letter, are, "Don't dillydally."
Her funeral brings family together, and at last we meet Schmidt's daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis) and her fiance, Randall Hertzel (Dermot Mulroney). Schmidt and Jeannie have a chilly relationship that unravels as the film progresses. Jeannie treats her father as though he were a nuisance, and accuses him of being a cheapskate: he buys only the second cheapest casket for his departed wife. In fact, everything unravels upon the wife's death: Schmidt learns about an unseemly affair his wife had with his best friend 25 years earlier, and he temporarily renounces both (one posthumously, of course). In the meantime, Warren himself becomes completely undone, more or less incapable of taking care of the house and his meals. In one of the funniest transitions in recent memory, the film jumps ahead after the funeral "Two Weeks Later" where we find the previously immaculate house utterly trashed.
We learn a lot about Schmidt through letters he writes (and whose contents we hear in voice over) to Ndugu, a 6 year old Tanzanian boy whom he sponsors after seeing a TV pitch for charity. The letters, almost always given a touch of absurd humor by the mere context of the situation, serve as an extraordinary outlet for anger against his wife, his only middling success, and his future son-in-law.
Warren decides, spur of the moment, to visit his daughter in Denver earlier than the expected time before the wedding. In fact, he fantasizes somehow getting his daughter to leave Randall, whom he understandably feels is not good enough for her. The road trip that ensues is bizarre and picaresque, episodic like David Lynch's "Straight Story" or... "Easy Rider." But here, the adventure is not on a lawn mower or motorcycle, but a deluxe RV motorhome that Warren had co-purchased with his wife. Seeing Nicholson maneuver this behemoth through small American towns is worth the price of admission alone.
When we meet fiance Randall and his family, we understand Warren's reservations. They paint a full blown portrait of dysfunction. Randall's saucy, "very orgasmic" mother, played with flair and bravura by Kathy Bates; his brother, who looks ready to OD any minute, every minute; and Randall himself, with his shady schemes, acid wash jeans, mullet hair (with corresponding balding patch), and inordinately bad sense of timing and taste-- all give Nicholson's Warren deep pause, not to mention a killer crick in the neck thanks to Randall's "top of the line" waterbed.
The movie's final 10 minutes are a series of revelations that more than make up for any slackness in pace. Nicholson digs deep and delivers a stunning, emotional about face, moving within instants from what sounds to me like suicidal despair to a wordless expression of self worth and human interconnectedness. He finally seems to have shaken free of the loneliness that has plagued him in his job, in his relationship with his daughter, and with his wife, despite 42 years of marriage. He has touched someone. He has made a difference.
Recommended:
Yes
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trust12345
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Member: John Stone
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