About Schmidt
Grade: C
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Hope Davis, Dermot, Mulroney, Kathy Bates, Len Cariou, June Squibb, Howard Hesseman
Director: Alexander Payne
Rated: R, for language, nudity, general nastiness
Running time: 125 minutes


BY PHILIP MARTIN
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
About Schmidt, the third film from Alexander Payne, after the admirable Citizen Ruth (1996) and the excellent Election (1999), is a serious work with serious problems. While it has been showered with critical approbation (Los Angles film critics went so far as to vote it the best film of the year) and features an affecting lead performance by Jack Nicholson, one can’t avoid feeling it is a movie made by snobs for snobs. There is an unmistakable meanness of spirit informs Payne’s venomous portrayals of the common Americans who infest fly-over land; viewed from a particular angle About Schmidt resembles nothing so much as a reformed provincial’s attempt to get in good with his betters by dissing the folks back home.
And while Payne obviously fancies himself a a no-holds-barred social satirist, a friendless son of Swift ever ready to prick the inflated pretensions of fools, in truth About Schmidt is about as thoughtful as a Jeff Foxworthy one-liner: You might be a petit bourgeois businessman/waterbed-selling loser if your wife collects M.I. Hummel figurines/you wear a mullet. You might be a hip Hollywood director if you invite your audience to feel superior to your dull normal characters, your straw boobs who dance to Bachman-Turner Overdrive at their sad little florescent tube-lit wedding receptions and take pride in their motorhomes. You can laugh at this kind of thing, but it ought to make you a little queasy as well. After all, human beings live in trailer parks and eat at McDonald’s and watch Jerry Springer on TV.
While we can’t know what was in Payne’s heart, and it’s possible that his insistence on removing novelist Louis Begley’s character Albert Schmidt from his sumptuous Long Island digs to Nebraska is a sign of integrity, or at least of fealty to his home town. But Payne’s Midwest is a gulch of despair, an intellectual dead zone filled with Babbits and Rotarian glad-handers in J.C. Penney polyester sport coats.
And Payne’s Schmidt is no longer a wealthy retired attorney wondering how he’ll be able to shield his daughter from the taxes attached to his transferring his $2 million house to her and her husband — and how he’s going to manage to get by on a paltry $330,00 a year — but rather a just-retired actuary/vice-president at Omaha’s Woodmen of the World insurance company. And unlike Begley’s Schmidt — a not so subtle anti-Semite annoyed that his daughter is engaged to a young lawyer at his old firm, “a wonk, a turkey, a Jew!” — Payne’s Schmidt is an all-purpose misanthrope, an imaginationless dimwit who, we are supposed to believe, long ago abandoned all passion for a kind of comfortable zombiehood.
Payne’s Schmidt retires at the opening of the film, and appears ready to be pushed by his busybody wife (June Squibb) into a life of carefree Winnebago touring. Yet her sudden death releases him from this obligation and leaves him unmoored and unhinged — he’s upset that his shipping clerk daughter (Hope Davis) is getting married to an idiot (Dermot Mulroney), so he takes off in the motorhome to Denver, determined to stop the proceedings.
He is, for reasons we needn’t go into here, sidetracked into a ramble through the Midwest, visiting the touchstones of his youth. Here he encounters other Midwesterners, people remarkable mainly for their lack of irony and inability to dress themselves. He makes uncomfortable passes at housewives, he talks to his own dead wife and divines — in a shooting star, no less — a sign of her compliance with his mission.
He moves on to Denver, to encounter the groom’s loud and trashy family, a gang addicted to New Age bromide, lowbrow humor and sexual immodesty. They live in a working-class neighborhood where shirtless fat men take out the garbage. Ick.
Not that the filmmakers have any responsible to the novel beyond meeting Begley’s price, but Payne’s Schmidt is more like the book’s prospective son-in-law than the novel’s bigoted yet vital title character. In the book Schmidt’s main complaint about his daughter’s fiance is that the young man lacks poetry, that he’s more or less a machine for making money. Payne’s Schmidt has vaguer objections — he sees the boy as “simply not up to snuff,” with his pyramid marketing schemes and his ridiculous hairstyle.
Yet Payne’s Schmidt has one advantage — he is portrayed by Jack Nicholson, who happens to be one of the more fascinating people on the planet. And so, we might assume that the chief challenge facing such an active actor, a man used to attacking parts with bald ferocity, would be to mitigate and modulate his performance to impersonate such an “ordinary” person. Indeed, many critics have commented on Nicholson’s quiet accuracy — his performance seems destined for all kinds of nominations (though Daniel Day-Lewis will likely get the awards) — as the sad sack Schmidt.
Yet, though Nicholson’s performance is first-rate, it is possible to challenge a number of claims I’ve heard. Nicholson has played quieter “ordinary” characters before, in last year’s The Pledge, Blood And Wine (1997), The Crossing Guard (1995) and The Border (1982). And it’s reasonable to suggest his work in these films has been superior to his scenery-chewing roles in movies like As Good As It Gets (1997), Wolf (1994), A Few Good Men (1992) and The Witches of Eastwick (1987). Furthermore, I’d suggest that Nicholson’s work in About Schmidt is closer to his “Saucy Jack” work than his best work — a scene late in the film when he attends a wedding rehearsal dinner stoned on Percodan may be well-acted, but it sure ain’t subtle.
As for the rest of the cast, Davis is worth citing — hers is the only character that retains a kernel of dignity. Kathy Bates and Mulroney take broad, comic swipes at the caricatures they’re called upon the play — Howard Hesseman manages to register in a part that’s barely there.
And one shouldn’t misunderstand; About Schmidt is not an inept or poorly realized picture, it is a film that most serious moviegoers will want to see. And if they want to see it, they should — Payne is an important director, Nicholson is perhaps the most important American star since Bogart. But Payne wants us to laugh at the sentimentality of his characters while we take his own sentimentality seriously, the main trick of the movie is to put us — the audience — on the same level as the filmmakers. That is, it flatters us by inviting us to look down on the poor churning mortals, the bumpkins and the rubes.
But it is not really like that out here. The middle of the country is not what the hipsters in New York and Los Angeles say it is. It is easy to make up jokes about the people you create; it is easy to make fun of people who shop at Wal-Mart and eat at Applebees. About Schmidt is a sad film, but it’s not sad because Schmidt is sad, but because it is a film based on a lie — a lie that’s all to easy to tell. A lie that might even be malicious.

hilip_martin@adg.ardemgaz.com">philip_martin@adg.ardemgaz.com