About Schmidt
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Movie Reviews of About Schmidt
Movie Review: Alexander Payne's Dramatic Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Earlier last evening, I saw Alexander Payne's new movie, "About Schmidt," which opened in the Philadelphia area this Friday. I have been hearing about it since its limited run began, particularly on talk radio, and some of the callers have dismissed it as "what happens when Hollywood makes fun of Midwesterners and Midwestern values." Well, there's some of that in there, but I don't see the source so much as Hollywood, as much as a dead-on self-critique and self-reflection that could have only come from screenwriters who themselves are part and parcel of the Midwest Plains states. Payne and co-scenarist Jim Taylor (who also co-wrote "Citizen Ruth" and "Election") have made a masterpiece of a character study in finding out what makes the stoic and enigmatic Warren Schmidt tick.When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who introduced me to a writer who would become my favorite novelist, Sinclair Lewis. To me, "Main Street," "Babbitt," and "Arrowsmith" accurately captured the plain-spokenness and dry humor of the region, through Lewis' naturalistic writing style. But Lewis was more than a recorder of the everyday people around him, he was a master of keen observation, and seeing the quirky denizens of Zenith and Gopher Prairie through his words filled me as a reader with the sense of what I call the "inner adventure."
What Lewis had going for him as a novelist, I see in Payne's movies: The same sense of wry observation, absurd humor that arises out of awkward and painful situations, and biting social commentary that never wallows into the territory of judgmental didacticism. To me, Jack Nicholson's Warren Schmidt is, like Carol Kennicott of "Main Street," an angry loner, who is dissatisfied with the world around him. But, whereas "Main Street" follows Carol out of college and into a stifling marriage -- in which she can only survive by suppressing her innate sense of romanticism and adventurism -- "About Schmidt" catches its tragicomic hero at the tail end of his life, after decades of lonely emotional withholding have dried up the once puissant earnestness and ambition he once had. He lives his life, as Thoreau penned, "in quiet desperation."
I agree with many people, however, who have said "I don't know what to make of this movie"; Not that I don't know what to make of it, but I agree that *they* don't. There are many times when Nicholson just keeps a stiff upper lip, and tries to sail through awkward situations by responding with pained silence. And, although some genuine humor came out of some of those scenes (e.g., scene in the trailer, scene in the hot tub), many of the theatergoers in attendance laughed at each and every one of his silences, as if on cue, or as if waiting or expecting to be cued. It is something I first picked up on when seeing "Vertigo" at an Austin theater a few years ago, that people break out into nervous laughter during awkward or silent moments. It is a discomforting thing for people to have to face, and stirs the reflexive reaction of the viewer to equally awkward giggling or laughter, rather than having to face the protagonist's silence with their own. Of course, as allegedly "passive" participants, it is unintentional on their part. Yes, the ending to the movie was a poignant and cathartic moment, but it is the one moment when catharsis is permitted the viewer, inasmuch as we the viewers are handed a veritable table of permissible emotions. Up to that point, Schmidt is a repressor, and likewise viewers repress any honest emotional response to his character. That's where Payne really got his point across, in spades; It was just as interesting listening to their reactions as it was watching Payne's characters on the screen acting out theirs.
As for the movie as a whole, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and was both entertained and enlightened. The supporting cast was excellent, though two-dimensional. This is by design, because we are viewing these offbeat people through the subjective eyes of Warren Schmidt. Dermot Mulroney as the loutish, Amway-pushing son-in-law-to-be is perfect casting, with his annoying ponytailed mullet and cheesy goatee. Howard Hesseman and Kathy Bates also liven the cast with their aging-hippie-cum-white-trash characterizations.
I especially enjoyed the hot tub scene with a nude Kathy Bates. It took a lot of courage for Payne to do that, because Bates is overweight, aging and doesn't fit the image what the fashionistas tell us is beautiful. But lemme tell ya, she is one beautiful woman, and exudes so much self-assuredness and expressiveness. I hope some able sculptor poses her for a Venus statue. It would be much more alluring and fascinating than one of any of the current crop of pubebots People magazine tries to ram down our throats.
Another nice touch is using Erik Satie's "Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear" as part of the soundtrack. Any other director would have used something more obvious, such as Debussy or even Chopin to convey the overwhelming sense of solitude and irresolution. Satie's music melds seamlessly and beautifully with Nicholson's onscreen solitary wanderlust.
"About Schmidt" is not Alexander Payne's funniest movie ("Election" wins that, hands down) nor is it his most satirical ("Citizen Ruth" pushes the envelope a lot farther than this one). However, through Warren Schmidt's journey into the undiscovered self, Payne has crafted a masterpiece of understated comedic drama on par with Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" or Wes Anderson's "Rushmore."
Movie Review: A rather extraordinary film about ordinary people.
Summary: 5 Stars
Warren Schmidt is a man whose very essence is that of "being bottled up." A very decent but equally very unprepossessing man, he has gone through sixty-six years of life largely unable to connect either with his inner self or with others. He is in fact so very ordinary that he represents a sort of "everyman." His story, told simply yet not without eloquence, is about two journeys upon which he embarks following his retirement. One of these journeys - the one lying on the surface, representing his interactions with all those whom he knows - is a tragi-comic mix which, at the end, gets him no closer to himself than he was at the start. The other journey is largely beneath the surface and told much more sparingly but in the end with a sense of satisfaction that is quite startling. This satisfaction, to the viewer, doesn't necessarily sink in immediately; in fact, I can imagine that some - perhaps many - "just don't get it." But I did, and was left with a feeling of closure. And with a sense of total awe at how perfectly Jack Nicholson totally subsumed himself in the title role.
The very ordinariness of Schmidt is made apparent in the opening scene. He is watching the clock on his very last day of work in his Omaha office (thence to go to his retirement dinner that evening). But not a second before the clock strikes 5:00. His inability to communicate, to connect with others, is made apparent as early as at his retirement dinner. It is to continue - in this "journey lying on the surface" - throughout the story.
Schmidt is ill-prepared to deal with anything other than routine. Retirement is "other than routine"; thoughts of how to deal with it seemingly never entered his mind. He drops back in the office unannounced, only to find himself neither wanted nor needed. Largely at the prodding of his wife, he has already purchased a large Winnebago, so that the two of them can "see the country in their golden years." And then, just barely days into retirement, his wife dies. The funeral service is hardly a galvanizing event; Schmidt's inability to communicate, to open up, even to his daughter, soon to be married to a fiance he dislikes, further estranges him from those closest to him.
Now left to fend for himself, we see how ill-prepared for life he really is. The mess begins to pile up as he attempts to deal with restructuring his life, beginning with his wife's possessions. In a shoebox, he finds decades-old love letters to his wife; he had once been cuckolded by his best friend. But at the same time, he undertakes a seemingly insignificant task that will eventually lead to catharsis for him: Through an international foster child agency, he "adopts" a six-year-old Tanzanian boy. Counting on a cloak of anonymity, he begins a series of letters to the boy; his very first efforts at communicating his true feelings.
All of this takes up barely the first 30 minutes of the story. The balance largely depicts his RV travels, first in an effort to go back in time to rediscover his roots (not exactly a success when he finds his boyhood home replaced by a tire store and students in his college fraternity disinterested in him) and then to go from Omaha to Denver for his daughter's upcoming wedding. On the way, an outgoing fellow RV-er befriends him, and when the RV-er's equally outgoing wife and Schmidt are left alone while the husband leaves to fetch some beer, once again Schmidt's inability to communicate, now compounded by his inability to "read" other people, has its embarrassingly sad consequences.
Schmidt eventually arrives in Denver for his daughter's wedding. The whole affair, like much of his life, is almost entirely anticlimactic, save for one escapade between Schmidt and the groom's lusty mother, played to a faretheewell by Kathy Bates. It is at this time that one wishes that Schmidt would break out of his shell, and his failure to do so cannot be blamed on this earth mother of a woman, who gave him her best shot.
All of this leaves Schmidt little more than numb - numb as he'd been throughout - as, finally , he leaves Denver and arrives back home in Omaha. He scoops up some weeks' worth of mail, ignoring all but one.
And that one he doesn't ignore? It is the one that finally gives him the emotional release he had bottled up inside him for a lifetime. Yes, it was from that Tanzanian boy. And Nicholson-as-Schmidt, in a most memorable fade-out scene, undergoes what I can only describe as "simply one of the most transformative pieces of acting it's ever been my pleasure to see." And it gives the viewer the release needed as well. It lingers; it truly does.
This is a "small" picture, not for all tastes, about very ordinary people, most of whom are hardly memorable and who fade into the background when their purposes have been served. The casting is nigh-perfect for these ordinary, forgettable people, save for Kathy Bates, who occupies the only unforgettable personage in the movie aside from Schmidt himself.
But this is really Jack's picture. The extent to which he has made himself into Schmidt is remarkable. It is an understatement to say that he subsumed himself in the role: with his seething-beneath-the-surface dissatisfaction and emptiness, his ennui, his communicative constriction and his "everyman" as "a nobody," not to mention the downsizing of his normally monstrous emotive range, Nicholson IS Schmidt. THIS is what great acting is all about.
Bob Zeidler
Movie Review: All joking aside
Summary: 5 Stars
Jack Nicholson is Warren R. Schmidt, an Omaha insurance executive being forcibly retired at the too-early age of 66. He has lived to see his work literally binned by his firm. His daughter Jeannie rarely visits. His wife has become an unpleasant stranger. He has some twenty years, give or take, left to live. (Social commentary everywhere. Sixty-six is not what it used to be: Schmidt is entirely too lively and rugged to be permanently benched.)
The formulae of literature classes suddenly spring to mind. Schmidt is an honest-to-god Everyman: an Everyman who missed every flight to Hollywood. He presents as if bleached, as if a personification of a second-greatest generation, a sum of values, not features. He is The Minimalist Midwesterner: thrift, privacy, and industry incarnate. His plight is memorable; critically, he is not. Schmidt is such an intensely private character that not even the audience will know him entirely.
The film begins as a subtle, well-executed comedy of insulted dignity, as Schmidt tries to find a way to occupy his hours. He tries and fails to slip back to the office. His wife has splurged on a luxury Winnebago and threatens "lots of good times ahead".
Schmidt retreats to the television, clicks through channels, and sees a beseeching ad for "Childreach", a charity devoted to children in the Third World. An announcer warns that, "no, pity and guilt won't help", and Schmidt calls in his pledge.
A form letter arrives with a boldface name, and Schmidt, eyebrows raised, is delivered of a son, six-year old Ndugu of Tanzania. Some $22 is expected of him per month, and the charity suggests a task: Schmidt should write the boy a letter of introduction with a few particulars about his own life in America.
Schmidt pulls out a legal pad and begins to compose the majority of the film's script, an epistolary narrative of one-sidedness. Schmidt takes to self-absorption with seriousness and therapeutic result. It is through the letters that the film shifts gears, with comedy gradually decelerating into genuine pathos.
His first letter to Ndugu complains about his wife, a banal asterisk of a woman, as matronly as Schmidt is stoically handsome. Before they can take a single "adventure" trip, she fatally strokes out while a passive-aggressive Schmidt "dillydallies" over errands. He finds her pitched forward on the carpet, as her vacuum-cleaner weeps gently on.
Ever the actuary, Schmidt recalculates his life expectancy in light of his solitude. The future looks bleaker and shorter. He buries his wife, as his daughter will later discover, in the second-cheapest coffin available: thrift.
The orphaned Schmidt clings tighter to his imaginary companion Ndugu, and he sets out in his Ark-sized trailer to rescue his daughter for the foolishness of her impending marriage, only weeks away. Her fiancé sports a mullet. His opening salvo to Schmidt involved a transparent sales pitch with the reassuring tag, "this isn't a pyramid scheme." The fiancé truly isn't good enough.
Schmidt's first sign of life comes when he winningly decides to accept "you sad, sad man" as a sexual overture from a married woman he meets on his journey. Her screams of rejection prompt a dark night of the soul.
When Schmidt finally reaches Denver for the wedding, he joins his future in-laws, including the mother of Jeannie's fiancé (Kathy Bates). Cultures collide. Schmidt recoils from a ghastly brush with incest inflicted by Bates through her detailed revelations of Jeannie's sex life. Apparently, "the kids" will hold their marriage together with their "what goes on under the sheets."
Kathy Bates bursts out of her role as a clapped-out old hippie, weirdly blowing her timing in a number of lines. It becomes abruptly clear that she is a great dramatist, not a comedian, and that she cannot be shoe-horned into someone else's film: her presence and talent register too profoundly. Her infamous nude scene, as she joins Schmidt in a creepily snug hot-tub, is more unkind than clever, and is directed more like a stunt (Extreme Nudity) than a dramatic scene. She thrills momentarily as she flings down a chicken bone in disgust when her ex-husband, a pompous Toastmaster type, delivers a welcoming oration to Schmidt.
At last, Schmidt receives a response from Tanzania, and its lessons come with the force of a body blow. A Belgian nun has finally, kindly replied, explaining in a short note penned in creaky English that Ndugu is yet too young to read or write, but that she has shared the letters' contents. Schmidt's money has provided medication to save Ndugu's eyesight. Her gentleness, foreign to the rest of the film, has the same effect as violence, exploding like a bomb against Schmidt's identity, his delusions and pride.
In exchange for Ndugu's vision, Schmidt finally experiences insight. No more letters to be written with the demented obliviousness of a senile grandfather: "I bet you're eager to cash this cheque and get yourself something to eat."
Schmidt, citizen of the First-World, needs tiny Ndugu more than he is needed. The tactful Sister is somewhat puzzled by Schmidt's avalanche of confessional correspondence. At best, Ndugu has been given a précis of the contents. Now Schmidt is more alone than ever. But wait: the boy has enclosed a drawing of two stick figures, one small, one large, holding hands, conjoined against a rainbow. Ndugu, the Earth's true future, will see, and Schmidt has found ties that bind.
Movie Review: Banality made into art
Summary: 5 Stars
Warren Schmidt is 65 or 66. He is sitting in his office at Woodman Insurance in Omaha, Nebraska (that would be Mutual of Omaha, one imagines) waiting for the second hand and the minute hand to go straight up signaling that it is exactly five o'clock and he can go home. He is precise about this. It is also his last day at work. He is retiring. There is a retirement party. It is incredibly banal: the little speeches of appreciation about his loyalty and how much he did for the company, the lame jokes, the wooden chicken, etc. It's so bad that at one point Schmidt has to slip out for a vodka.
And now he is into the sheer terror of retirement itself. He is having trouble figuring out what to do with himself. Being around his wife all the time irritates him. Not having something worthwhile to do bores him. He grumbles. He flicks the remote on the TV. He sees an ad to be a foster parent of a child in Tanzania. Twenty-two bucks. And then his wife of 42 years drops dead. The even more banal funeral. Now he really doesn't know what to do with himself. He lets the house go to ruin: trash all over the place. He doesn't shave. He doesn't get out of his bathrobe. His only daughter is marrying a guy he considers a nincompoop. He writes letters to his six-year-old foster child telling him about his circumstances, but with the rose-colored glasses on. He has nobody to talk to.
Jack Nicholson stars as Schmidt and gives a very fine performance. He is still obviously Jack Nicholson, one of the great stars of our time, but he is also Schmidt and he portrays this hollow man as though he is filled with angry, repressed bile. Nicholson has the theatrical ability to overact without seeming to overact, to huff and puff and make hurt faces that seem so natural and in keeping with his character that we watch transfixed. Nicholson somehow makes this most commonplace man and his most ordinary life fascinating.
What I was wondering as I watched was, how does this play in Peoria? (BYW, that's Peoria, Illinois, which serves however reluctantly as the psychological and politically-correct heart of America--or at least it has since John Ehrlichman of the Nixon administration first used the term in 1970.) Will Peorians be offended? Will the stifling banality of Schmidt's life be seen as satire and criticism of the American way of life, the usual blue state effete snobbery inflicted on the heartland citizens of the red states? Or will heartlanders see no satire, no sarcasm, and instead imagine that Schmidt is the embodiment of all that is right and proper (with a few understandable human peccadillos to round out his character)?
So I checked out some reader reviews. I couldn't find any reviewers that were offended. The ones who didn't like the movie said they were just bored to tears, or actually bored to anger. They wasted their time and money on this movie! Well, that doesn't mean much. Any movie without a constant stream of titillation is bound to bore some people.
But the movie is sad. Schmidt is a sad character. He calls himself a failure and asks if he has made any difference in anybody's life and he concludes that he hasn't. He is an empty shell of a man whose relationships with other people were invariably shallow including that with his daughter about whom he hasn't a clue.
Yet the movie is funny. Most of the humor comes from how perfectly director Alexander Payne got the insipid banalities of our culture and mentality: The knickknacks that Schmidt leaves on the roof of the Winnebago. The roadside museums with their self-important histories. The bromides and platitudes from the groom-to-be (Dermot Mulroney) and his Ponzi scheme dream of wealth. Schmidt's stupidity in mistaking a younger woman's pity for sexual desire. His stupefying inability to have the slightest clue about anybody but himself.
The supporting cast was very good, particularly Kathy Bates as Roberta the groom's earth mother with libido who fills the screen with her...uh, unmistakable presence, scaring Schmidt all the way back to Omaha. And Hope Davis is excellent as the daughter who no longer has any patience with her father's selfish obtuseness. The scene in which she tells him off in no uncertain terms is one of the best movie putdowns I've seen in years.
But see this for Alexander Payne whose directorial credits include Election (1999) and Sideways (2004). It is no coincidence that he was born in Omaha, Nebraska.
Movie Review: Brilliant acting, black humor, hard truths.
Summary: 5 Stars
Nicholson nails this character, a man whose life is quite commonplace. He has done his duty. He has supported a wife and an only daughter. He is fussily punctilious about his job, and in that he takes some satisfaction. Then he retires and everything changes.
One by one the elements of his self-image are destroyed. He is not important at his job. He returns to 'help' his replacement, and is brushed off. His daughter lives in another city. His wife, whose steadfastly cheerful manner gets on his nerves, is someone which whom he no longer has any sense of connection. He idealizes his relationship with his daughter, and despises as unworthy the shifty and none-too-bright man she plans to marry.
Unhappy as he emerges into the emptiness of his retirement, and without insight into his lack of depth, lack of interests, and lack of any authentic sense of connection with any other human being, he watches television, flipping the channels. On impulse, while watching a commercial for a foreign-aid charity, he decides to "adopt" a foster son in Africa, and commits to send money monthly to the charity.
It is then that he reveals the bizarre degree of his alienation. He begins writing letters to this little boy, as if a child from another culture was in some way able to understand and relate to Schmidt's situation.
He has some serious shocks in store. First, he learns that his relationship with his daughter is not the simple and affectionate one he assumed it was. She resents that he has selected the second-cheapest coffin for his wife's funeral. She resents that Schmidt has asked for money from his wife's investments to buy a mobile home. His daughter dismisses his explanation, that his wife wanted a more luxurious model than Schmidt believed they could afford -- as if sharing the expenses of retirement with her husband was somehow unjust to the dead woman. And his daughter's words reveal that her mother had been complaining about Schmidt's behavior to her.
He learns that his wife had betrayed him in at least one other way -- she'd had an affair, years before, with his best friend.
And his daughter reveals that she basically wants his financial support, but does not want further intimacy.
He meets her fiancé's family, and they confirm his worst suspicions. They are vulgar, squabbling -- and poor. They constantly bring up the subject of money -- his -- always with a hand held out for some of it, either for dodgey investment or obligations they presume are his. Director Alexander Payne elicited brilliant performances from Bates and the other actors who played this dysfunctional family's members.
Then he makes a social blunder, mistaking a compassionate woman's words as sexually inviting. Her shocked reaction sends him into panicky flight!
And it is at this point that he receives a letter from a nun who works at the African charity to which he contributes. The child Ndugu can't read or write, so she's writing on his behalf to inform Schultz that the young boy wishes him well.
(I can't avoid an aside at this point -- in 'real life', what on earth would this nun have thought of Schmidt's letters to a little child, discussing matters such as his status in an insurance company, marital fidelity, 'trailer-trash' in-laws, and so forth? Surely a high point of black humor.)
And Schmidt caves. Finally -- and this is his terminal failure -- he is touched by Ndugu's words of gratitude and concern -- or by the conventional words of the nun -- and experiences what -- for him -- is an epiphany. He will do the 'right thing'. He will do his duty. He attends the wedding, says all the right things as the bride's father, and then returns to Omaha, to await the end of his days.
Film Noir, indeed! But I thought it was great. One gets sick of sentimentality.