An extraordinary, ordinary man

The opening sequences of his last two movies provide some
proof that Jack Nicholson’s much discussed new maturity is not simply one of
those inventions of the publicity folks and their accomplices in the
entertainment media. Both The Pledge and About Schmidt introduce
Nicholson’s character at a retirement party, thus indicating that unlike many
Hollywood stars, the actor accepts the inevitability of time and refuses to
indulge in the injections, face lifts, hair transplants, and other miracles of
modern surgery in order to play younger parts — thus, to paraphrase Yeats,
spitting in the face of time that transfigures him. Perhaps not coincidentally,
his performances in both pictures belong with his best work at any stage of his
career. After some years of skillfully impersonating Jack Nicholson, he is
really acting once again.

            Nicholson
plays the title character, Warren Schmidt, who retires from a position as an
assistant vice president and actuary with an insurance company in Omaha.
Unaccustomed to the empty days of retirement, Warren misses the office, the
routine, and his co-workers, but learns the sad, familiar lesson, that nobody
there misses him in turn.

            He also
realizes, perhaps for the first time, the emptiness of his life, the stifling
repression of his marriage, the dullness of his daily round of meaningless
tasks, the inconsequentiality of his existence. With no inclination or talent
for introspection, he expresses himself frankly only in the letters he writes
to a six-year-old Tanzanian boy he sponsors through a humanitarian program. The
letters, spoken in the actor’s dry, controlled, ironic voice, provide the only
hints of Warren’s thoughts, as well as a sort of epistolary refrain for the
drab music of his life.

            When his
wife dies suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, Warren confronts a larger
loneliness, exacerbated by his beloved daughter Jean’s impending wedding to an
amiable idiot who sells waterbeds and concocts pyramid schemes. Wandering
around his now messy house, unable to handle the business of daily life, Warren
takes off in a monster motor home originally intended for those golden years
— the purportedly joyous, endless vacation of retirement in America.

            The simple
trip from Omaha to Denver, where his daughter will be married, with several
stops along the way, ultimately becomes the familiar journey of understanding.
Warren comes to understand just a little about himself, his relationship with
his daughter, and his ambiguous grief for his wife’s death. He also comes to
find some significance in what he has regarded as an empty, humdrum existence.

            Director
Alexander Payne extracts a considerable variety of meaning and emotion from the
movie’s simple, linear plot. Much of the film depends upon the remarkable
intertwining of all its elements, so that the flat prairies of Nebraska and
Kansas he drives through in his enormous Winnebago reflect the barren
dreariness of Warren’s world, the poverty of his imagination and interests, the
dullness of the places he visits, the banality of the people he encounters.
That apparently universal vapidity sometimes creates some very funny comedy; at
other times, some mordant satire; and sometimes, even a genuine sadness as
bleak and depressing as the empty landscape.

            Since he
appears in every frame of About Schmidt,
Nicholson must carry the picture — a difficult task made easier by a strong
script and a fine supporting cast. Aside from the letters he speaks on the
soundtrack, Warren rarely reveals his thoughts and feelings. Nicholson must
simply react with small variations of expression and tone. His essentially
passive performance demonstrates the depth of his talent and skill. Through
slight gestures, frowns, squints, politely insincere smiles, sidelong glances,
pauses, and hesitations, he enables the audience to understand all that he does
not and, in fact, cannot say — all the meaning he conceals beneath the bland,
reiterated platitudes; the false jolliness; the dull, everyday dialogue that
passes for communication in our time and place. Nicholson brings a completely
uninteresting man to life and forces the audience to share his humor, his
sorrow, his pain.

            As the
jolly, exuberant, aggressively Bohemian mother of the moronic groom (Dermot
Mulroney), Kathy Bates steals most of the scenes she inhabits by contrast with
Nicholson’s underacting. After informing Warren, to his horror, of her sexual
excitability and highly orgasmic nature, she makes an unequivocal pass at him
in a hot tub. Although neither lithe nor lovely nor young, Bates allowed the
director to film her in a brief nude shot, an act of courage, grace, and
sincere artistry, for which she deserves enormous credit. Her authenticity and
integrity epitomize the beauty of a picture about ordinary people in ordinary
situations. She doesn’t look like a movie star, but like what we often call a
“real person.”

            In its
portrait of a distressingly ordinary life in an entirely unremarkable region of
the country, its steadfast refusal to glamorize its people or places, About Schmidt constitutes a radical
triumph, a far more experimental work than the self-consciously arty Adaptation. The film’s feel for the
surfaces of life — the flat Western landscape, dotted with diners and Dairy
Queens, its communities sewn together by the empty interstate highways; the
boring cities; the cluttered, overfurnished houses of the middle class —
intensifies the sense of constriction in the characters’ relationships, the
behaviors of highly inhibited people, the awkward banalities of public speech,
the general failures of human communication.

            About Schmidt is a small
masterpiece of control and unity, as satisfyingly genuine and ordinary as what
we like to think of as real life. Like Nicholson’s performance, the film is a tour de force.

About Schmidt,
starring Jack Nicholson, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney, Kathy Bates, Len Cariou,
Howard Hesseman, June Squibb, Connie Ray, Harry Gruener, Cheryl Hamada;
screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor; based on the novel by Louis
Begley; directed by Alexander Payne. Cinemark Tinseltown; Regal Culver Ridge;
Regal Eastview; Regal Henrietta.

You can hear George and his movie reviews on WXXI-FM 91.5
Fridays at 7:15 a.m., rerun on Saturdays at 11:15 a.m.

This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2003.