A Very Good Movie and a Very Bad Movie
As I post this, Alexander Payne is all the rage again, with his "The Descendants" poised for Oscar nominations and possible wins.
I may be wrong on the facts, but I think he's only made 5 movies, plus the pilot film for the HBO series "Hung."
So the critics have a pretty manageable "Alexander Payne canon" to analyze, and it seems to break out like this:
Two nasty and satrical movies:
Citizen Ruth
Election
Three mellow and observational movies about middle-aged to elderly men:
About Schmidt
Sideways
The Descendants
(Add "Hung" in there, too -- the protagonist is a male high school coach heading for middle-age but still "hung" enough to become an upsacle male hooker for ladies)
"About Schmidt" hits just about in the middle of the pack chronologically. Looking at it, I can see the nicely quiet and empathetic "observational humor" yet to come in "Sideways" and "The Descendants"(this is the "good movie")
but I can also see a fair amount of scathing, cartoonish condescenion which is, perhaps, a remnant of Payne's nastiest film, "Election."
"About Schmidt" opens brilliantly, with Jack Nicholson's Warren Schmidt sitting in his empty office, surrounded by a stack of boxes with the "work papers of his life" and staring at a clock about to strike 5:00 pm and to end his working life and usher him into retirement.
That little scene -- just a few shots -- could be a movie unto itself. A sad movie. A "bracing" movie. A movie that -- depending upon how close you are to retirement age yourself, says something "very profound" about the "end of working life" and its relationship to the end of LIFE.
Nicholson makes his statement in that scene, too. Mad Jack was always one of the first actors to start showing weight on his face and his gut(he followed mentor Marlon Brando in doing this), but he'd always managed to undercut his girth with that stereophonic voice and a certain aging-satyr comic energy.
That's all gone here. Warren Schmidt is a man whose pudgy, shapeless face, with its combover hair, bears the weight of collapse and age, all very real. Too many men know it all too well, and Nicholson's "for certain" 2002 Oscar nomination came largely from his willingness to look terrible. Or to look (as Payne requested of him)...like a "little man." A fat little man. Indeed, something weird occurs early in "About Schmidt": placed in shots alongside fellow aged actor Len Cariou...Nicholson doesn't even look like the "movie star" in "About Schmidt." CARIOU looks like the movie star. But Nicholson had a much more illustrious earlier career than Cariou, becomes much richer in the business...and played about 15 early years of that career as a sexy man as well as a "prestige actor".
So Nicholson's good. And the music is good, melancholy and funny in equal measure. And the "Dear Ndgugo" gambit is great -- well read in Nicholson's stereo voice, very funny and certainly ridiculous(Schmidt actually thinks this kid READS this stuff?) but also of course, "the talk therapy of Warren Schmidt." The shots of the wide open spaces of "flyover mid-America" are good as is the melacholy that accompanies them(nowwhere better than in those scenes where Schmidt tries to revisit the haunts of his youth.)
All of that is good enough for me to like "About Schmidt" and to offer it my good will when it comes on the TV...BUT...
...there's a very Very Bad Movie in there as well. Critics caught it at the time. Some tolerated it, some accused it.
The condescenion. The feeling, from start to finish, that this was a "hip and rich Hollywood elitist's sneering view" of "the little people" who live in Nebraska(where Payne himself grew up but probably felt he "escaped") work in insurance companies ,eat in chain restaurants and make boring talk about boring subjects and live empty little lives. Jack Nicholson crafts Warren Schmidt in lots of realistic touches -- and Payne surrounds him with gargoyles. It is made clear that the family into which Schmidt's daughgter is marrying is filled with morons and creeps. But is also made clear that Schmidt's own daughter -- however neglected by him over her life -- is also somewhat of an idiot, bound and determined to marry into those other idiots because, perhaps...well, her hatred of her father's neglect and parsimonious ways has blinded her to any "richness of life."
Nope, it is hard to say that Payne has much care for any of the characters other than Warren Schmidt(and, somewhat, Len Cariou's fellow retiree, a man sharp enough to "get the fakery" even as he lives it). Little care for the grinning young smarm who replaces Schmidt at the insurance firm. Little care for Schmidt's wife who dies at the beginning of the film.("Who is this old woman who lives in my house?" grieves Jack to Ndugo.) Little for the daughter played (well) by Hope Davis as being at once justifiable in her contempt for her father and repulsive in the comportment of her own life(Payne makes sure we know that her job "in electronics" is a small and nothing "receiving" job --to Payne. "Out here," people live off such work.) Little care for the dopey and overanimated husband and chirpy-but-quietly-cruel wife who are in the RV next to Schmidt's on the road. And no care at all for the family headed by Kathy Bates and her "nincompoop" son Dermot Melroney(or however you spell it.)
The very good movie that "About Schmidt" begins as becomes a very bad movie as it moves along, and my feeling is that Alexander Payne was a gifted director who needed to choose: hard and mean cartoonish satire like "Election" or humane observation like "Sideways" and "The Descendants." With "About Schmidt," he was caught in between.
It took two more years for Payne to improve his game immeasurably: "Sideways." There is some condecension in "Sideways", too(the obese waitress at the end of the film and her trukcer husband), but that movie, made from a different kind of novel and with more "human" observation, gave us real characters who had a real capacity for growth as human beings. Certainly there is dimension to Giamatti's lovelorn wine snob and Virginia Madsen's kind waitress, but even Thomas Hayden Church's overaged horndog had his understandable human side. Payne seems to have needed to advance just one more film to "get it right" on human behavior writ small.
It took SEVEN more years for Payne to dare to try to match "Sideways."
"The Descendants" takes place in Hawaii, far from the cold flat dumpiness of Omaha, and though Payne takes pains to have Clooney talk about the lower classes and tough neighborhoods of Hawaii...it still looks like Paradise, and Payne seems to be a lot more comfortable with Clooney's upscale lawyer and his well-off neighbors and extended family than with the middle-class types in "About Schmidt."
Its too bad for "About Schmidt." With "Sideways" and "The Descendants" now in place after it, "Schmidt" looks even worse in terms of its scorn for its characters and the world they live in. The Very Bad Movie looks bad indeed.
But the Very Good Movie in "About Schmidt" is still there. In Nicholson's performance. In the music. In "Dear Ndugo"(which finally pays off profoundly in an ending that almost saves the movie.) In the overall unique idea -- practically buried in favor of the gargoyles -- that a retired 66-year old widower is a worthy subject for a movie about what that man will do with his FUTURE.
50/50. Good/bad. But then, a lot of movies are like that. Truly good ones(like "Sideways") are hard to make. Truly bad ones..easy. Its those in-between ones that we have in the greatest quantity.
P.S. You could say that the condesension of "About Schmidt" for its buffet-grazing middle-classers matches the atmosphere of "Fargo" from 6 years earlier, but "Fargo" managed to find the smarts and hearts (venal as well as pure) of the characters within a similar setting.