About Schmidt (15)

Jack's big adventure

There are two visual surprises in Alexander Payne's bleak Midwestern comedy About Schmidt. The first of them is Jack Nicholson who, as Warren Schmidt, looks tired, fat and very, very old. The second and greater surprise is that Schmidt's wife (June Squibb) looks exactly the same. It feels almost like the first time you've seen Nicholson on screen opposite a woman who isn't beautiful, or glamorous, or at least 25 years his junior. Who would have thought it ­ the horny old devil with his tail between his legs?

Schmidt himself can't quite believe he's been married for 42 years. As he reflects, "I have no idea what this old lady is doing in my house". But he still gets a shock when she drops dead in the middle of the spring-cleaning one morning. This calamity has followed another shake-up in Schmidt's life, his retirement after 35 years as an actuary for an Omaha insurance company, and this doubled sense of an ending prompts him to wonder about his own usefulness in the world. Irritated by his wife when she was alive, Schmidt and his house both fall to pieces now she's gone ­ and his belated discovery that she had an affair with his best friend a few decades back does nothing to lighten his burden.

Like previous malcontents Nicholson has incarnated on screen ­ the rebel attorney in Easy Rider, the oil-rigger in Five Easy Pieces ­ Schmidt impulsively hits the road, though in the unrebellious confines of the jumbo-size Winnebago he and his wife planned to drive on their retirement holidays. His ultimate destination is Denver, where he hopes to save his only daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) from marrying an oafish waterbed salesman named Randall (Dermot Mulroney) but first he revisits his birthplace, and finds that a tyre franchise now stands where his house used to be. (Heartbreakingly, he offers the bored assistant the irony that there used to be a tyre swing out in his garden.)

In the course of roaming the highways we learn the depth of Schmidt's loneliness and regret, expressed in the letters he writes to Ndugu, a six-year-old Tanzanian orphan he is sponsoring through an overseas charity for $22 a month. Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor lend to Schmidt's weary voice the sentiments he's bottled up for a lifetime: it's the sound of a decent, confused and rueful American Everyman.

The idea of Jack Nicholson playing him would once have been unthinkable. His presence has always seemed too volatile, too sardonic ­ too much ­ for a straight man. Age has now offered him the challenge, and he meets it head on: his Warren Schmidt is a beautifully restrained portrait of a man realising his own inadequacy, and the possibility of grace beyond it. Pouchier and paunchier, with a heavy, flat-footed gait, he's never looked so much like a defeated old man. While Nicholson has kept his eyebrows and grin under control before, here he has denied himself even the satiric energies that fire up his act ­ and by the time Schmidt has reached the end of his mini-odyssey that denial will feel extraordinarily effective.

For About Schmidt isn't just "about" Schmidt, it's about the cheerfulness and vulgarity of Midwestern folk, and their determination to do the best they can in the face of struggle. This becomes apparent once Schmidt arrives in Denver and finds himself smothered in the overbearing embrace of Jeannie's future in-laws, most signally Randall's garrulous and doting mother, Roberta (a tremendously vivid Kathy Bates); she not only tells him about the "white-hot" sex life of the soon-to-be-married couple but then takes leave to slide into the hot tub and cosy up next to her appalled guest. Then there is Randall himself, who would have a hard time being loveable even without his repulsive handlebar moustache and mullet. As Schmidt sees too clearly, the man is an intrusive nonentity, from his dodgy financial schemes and the "participation" certificates on his bedroom wall to the inappropriate hugs he visits on his father-to-be. Desperate to prise his daughter away from him, Schmidt tells Jeannie about a dream he's had in which she's been abducted by aliens, "and you know what, they all looked like Randall!" Jeannie, inevitably, is unimpressed.

As the picture enters its final quarter, one feels caught between the glum hilarity of Schmidt's discomfort and a noticeable upsurge in the screenwriters' mockery of Midwest manners. Payne and Taylor often match the needling wit that distinguished their last film, Election, with the difference that their targets then, electoral politics and Reese Witherspoon's brilliant imagining of a young Hillary Clinton, were so much more deserving of satire. Here one feels more ambivalent. The wedding, the film's climactic set-piece, is acutely observed (the warbling voices serenading bride and groom, the terrible best man's speech) yet behind it you hear a hard note of condescension that jars with the more affectionate tone earlier. This might be my misreading; I happened to watch About Schmidt with a friend who was born in the Midwest, and she, conversely, was in transports of nostalgic delight at the accuracy of regional detail (some of which, I regret, will fly right over the heads of audiences here).

Perhaps Payne, a native of Nebraska, felt ambivalent too, and wanted a tone that would balance satire against affection: bittersweet, I suppose, might be the word. Clearly he's done something right, if his collecting the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay earlier this week is anything to go by. Whatever uncertainties linger over its point of view, the film concludes with a message of such modest and heartfelt clarity that one feels as moved by the moment as its troubled title character is. Warren Schmidt, late in the day, has found a welcome in the world.