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TRAVELS WITH JACK
ABOUT SCHMIDT (R) Writer-director Alexander
Payne gained widespread attention for 1998's
Election, the brilliantly hysterical political satire
starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick
as student and teacher battling each other for
dignity in a public high school. With instant in
crowd success. Payne's follow-up has been eagerly
anticipated, despite his bizarre turn as screen
writer for Jurassic Park III (though it was actually
pretty good). With a return to writing and
directing, his latest project is an adaptation of a
novel by Louis Begley, whose most noted associa
tion with Hollywood previously was that Stanley
Kubrick had long attempted to adapt his book
Wartime Lies.
In About Schmidt. Jack Nicholson plays Warren
Schmidt, a 66-year-old Omaha insurance salesman
whom we meet on his last day at work as he
stares patiently at the clock. A respected man, he
attends a dinner in his honor that night to be
praised for years of hard work by drunken col
leagues, but he seems more comfortable sitting
alone at the bar. Retired life is naturally a tough
adjustment as the small things in life gradually
take center stage, either becoming the source of
all troubles or even worse, the point of living.
While staring at the
television one day, he's
suddenly absorbed by an ad
for one of those African
child-saving programs
which have largely desensi
tized the rest of us ever
since Sally Struthers first
bombarded us. But with
nothing bette r to do per
haps, Warren writes down
the number. Before long
Warren is writing a letter to
his new foster child, little
Ndugu, and for the price of
a cup of coffee a day, he
finds a way to vent his
frustrations in life - a nag
ging wife, the tedium of
retirement, and a daughter,
Jeannie (Hope Davis), whom he loves dearly but
believes to be throwing her life away by marrying
a dimwitted waterbed salesman named Randall
(Dermot Mulroney).
Despite his apparent animosity toward life,
Warren is deeply crushed when he comes home
one day to find his wife dead, lying on the floor
with the vacuum still running. The camera,
instead of showing us Warren's tearful face
absorbing the shock, drifts over to the vacuum
cleaner as if being sucked into it. The tedium now
a million times worse, Warren's life becomes a
wreck. Sitting in the recliner one evening, he
assesses the situation. With the sterile diction of
an insurance policy, he determines just how long
he is likely to live according to the statistics his
profession has required him to be so familiar with.
Without irony or drama, it is a moment haunted
by the eerie sadness of a likely truth.
After a couple of revelations in the thick of his
own loneliness, he decides to hit the road in the
R.V. that he and his wife had planned to vacation
in. Heading toward his daughter's home in Denver
to get there in time for the wedding, he tours the
Midwest taking interest in things and people he
might have previously only glanced at. When he
arrives in Denver, we meet Randall's mother
Roberta (Kathy Bates), a free-thinking, free-
talking divorcee who brags about breast-feeding
her son until age five, and the rest of the equally
quirky family. With his last bit of energy, Warren
hopes to talk Jeannie out of the marriage.
Throughout the film, he continues writing to
Ndugu, telling him and us with complete honesty
the state of his thoughts.
The people in About Schmidt look and sound
like real people. An Omaha
native himself, director
Payne brings to life the
regional quirks of the
Midwest without stereo
typing. With the potential
to sink into easy Farrelly
brothers-like hyperbole, he
admirably resists letting
mullets and catchphrases
become the center of
attention. Though it's easy
to chuckle at Randall's
wicked walrus 'stache
every time he waddles on
screen, what's more inter
esting is the innocent
twinkle in his eyes every
time he tries wholeheartedly to do the right thing.
Like Wes Anderson, Payne is more interested in
admiring naivete than laughing at it. Laughing is
simply the best way we show appreciation.
Jack Nicholson, like so many actors, is too
often praised for simply being himself. With one
eyebrow aimed at the sky and a big suspicious
grin, he just gives a nasally assertion of his guilty
thoughts and we scream genius. But with About
Schmidt, he seems to transcend the luck of his
natural charisma with one of his most reserved
performances to date. It's hard to imagine Jack
Nicholson ever pulling off harmless, but somehow
he does. And it's not so much the reactions in his
face throughout this odyssey of awkward
moments, it's the recurring look of not knowing
how to react that makes us want to scream genius
this time.
Our expectations for About Schmidt are consis
tently undercut because Warren is able to
undercut his own. It is a joyfully plotless movie,
carried along by simple discoveries as if touring
the human condition in a Winnebago. Resting
ever so confidently on the fence separating cyni
cism and sentimentalism, Alexander Payne asks us
to discover and admire the human spirit when our
most likely inclination is to laugh, and like Jack
Nicholson in so many scenes, we suddenly have
that look of not knowing how to react, and are
thus forced to find our own spirit.
Patrick Franklin
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