ABOUT SCHMIDT

Jack Nicholson is one commanding screen presence who pretty much does things his way just because, and playing retirement in a movie is no exception. It's hard to tell if Nicholson's opening sequence exit into job retirement in two films in a row - Sean Penn's The Pledge and now About Schmidt - is playful homage to the former by About Schmidt director, Alexander Payne. But whatever the rhyme or reason, Nicholson predictably works his unpredictable and mystifying charm, as deceptively bland lifelong life insurance agent Warren Schmidt.
Nicholson as American heartland conformist and nine to five serf Schmidt is the kind of character rarely seen in films, who is so self-effacing that he lives in the shadow of his own existence, drugged into invisibility by his self-inflicted obedient routine. Incapable of imagining leaving his office for the very last time even a second before the clock strikes five, Schmidt discovers just how empty his life is when there's nothing for him to do the very next day except tackle the newspaper jumble puzzle, or watch Bob Hope on the tube.
A wife who looks more like his mother and a grown daughter who doesn't want him around hardly helps matters, and further strains the disintegrating expectations of Schmidt's thwarted life. One major critical turning point of sorts presents itself when Schmidt on a whim becomes a sponsor and pen pal to a Third World orphan he takes notice of during one of those charity ads on TV, on a particularly dull afternoon.
It is the desolate old man's oddly humorous and heartfelt outpourings to six year old Tanzanian Ndugu Umbo that reveal just how much he has been out of touch with himself and the world. In any case, it's that gnawing question, are we having any fun yet, whose lack of any fundamental answer for Schmidt takes him on a painful and difficult but consciousness-awakening journey, not so easy rider style.
About Schmidt is a small story with a huge heart, a far from typical road movie with that restless youthful journey forward, but rather one where a spent life returns through time and space back all the way to childhood and down long forgotten paths, to possibly locate where and what was lost. There's plenty of comic relief along the way to smooth the solemn edges, not least of which is Nicholson himself in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get cocky yet humble, unself-conscious performance full of regret, rage and tenderness.
Prairie Miller