‘About Schmidt’ is about all of us
Published 8:31 am Thursday, February 28, 2008
The best humor arises from real emotional pain and those are the moments that Jack Nicholson squeezes ‘til we hurt in his latest film, “About Schmidt.” This slow moving (and that’s not always bad) film starts out with a series of shots of a lone tower in the middle of a midwestern town. This is not Sauron’s glaring eye of fire. It’s an insurance building —the Woodman building — and the pacing of this sequence and the bleakness of the solitary image gives us an idea of what we’re about to experience.
Warren Schmidt (Nicholson) is a lot like that building. In his own mind, he should tower above the rest of crowd, but he’s been a bit too wooden in his approach to life. Like a good little soldier he has marched through his allotted time on earth, doing the things he thought he was supposed to do. Married to a wife he no longer recognizes (“Who’s that old woman lying next to me in bed?”), estranged from a daughter who never quite lived up to his expectations, he has come to the end of an undistinguished career with nothing to show for it but a fancy motor home.
His disorientation and dissatisfaction with a life half lived escalates when his wife dies of a sudden heart attack. It seems like the only person he can talk to is his foster child, a 6-year-old Tanzanian orphan named Ndugu. Schmidt sends long soul bearing letters to Ndugu with his monthly support check. His uptight daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis) is no help. She won’t listen to his appeal to cancel her wedding to Randal, the mediocre waterbed salesman (Dermot Mulroney). Eventually Schmidt decides that his goal will be to make sure this wedding never takes place and sets out on a journey to Denver. If this were your typical movie, he’d find himself along the way. But true to his male character (and I mean this kindly), he ends up more lost than when he started.
Writer/director Alexander Payne (“Election”) and his co-writer Jim Taylor brilliantly employ their quirky and fearless ability to look American angst in the eye and end up laughing. Nicholson does himself a favor by really acting this time out. Some of his facial expressions still make me laugh when I picture them in my mind, mostly because they are tenderly underdone. What really makes this film great is the story’s ability to move the audience into a new realm of understanding while it leaves its characters, especially Schmidt, still standing in the dark.
Supporting actors, which include the always watchable Kathy Bates and the under seen Howard Hesseman, are pitch perfect. Director of Photography James Glennon, son of the legendary John Ford’s Director of Photography Bert Glennon, employs a sweeping sense of visual spectacle to this understated story. This casts the film in a mythic light and elevates this story about Schmidt to a story about Everyman.
