director
Alexander Payne
screenwriters
Alexander
Payne
Jim Taylor
based on
the novel by
Louis Begley
producers
Michael Besman
Harry Gittes
cinematographer
James Glennon
music
Rolfe Kent
editor
Kevin Tent
cast
Jack Nicholson (Warren Schmidt)
Hope Davis (Jeannie Schmidt)
Dermot Mulroney (Randall Hertzel)
Kathy Bates (Roberta Hertzel)
June Squibb (Helen Schmidt)
Howard Hesseman (Larry Hertzel)
Harry Groener (John Rusk)
Connie Ray (Vicki Rusk)
Len Cariou (Ray Nichols)
Mark Venhuizen (Duncan Hertzel)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 125m
u.s.
release: December 13,
2002
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other alexander
payne films
reviewed on this website:
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Jack Nicholson has been cloaked
in respectful critical and Oscar-watcher buzz for exactly the
wrong performance. People are responding to his work as the retired,
depressive widower Warren Schmidt in About Schmidt as
if he'd never done anything like it before -- as if he'd never
dialed himself down and given a muted, pained performance. For
that, I refer you to his outstanding work under the direction
of Sean Penn: The
Crossing Guard (1995) and The
Pledge (2001), neither of which got much attention. Why
now? Why this draggy, overcast, simplistic drama? Is it Nicholson's
courage in wearing his hair in a combover of such deep ugliness
that it puts Peter Jackson's Uruk-hai to shame?
Warren Schmidt, at 66, is dissatisfied
with his life. You can tell because director Alexander Payne
and his writing partner Jim Taylor make every effort to surround
Warren in big, lonely spaces that still feel cramped -- his suddenly
half-empty house, the mammoth Winnebago he drives from Omaha
to Denver for the wedding of his daughter (Hope Davis in a bad
mood that seems to have carried over from Hearts
in Atlantis) to a dopey mullethead (Dermot Mulroney).
This trip is somewhat out of character for Warren, who's so unaccustomed
to movement that the undulations of a water bed nearly cripple
him. Warren is a self-pitying lump at the center of an overlong
movie that has nothing in particular to say about his plight.
Payne and Taylor previously
crafted two deft, razor-sharp satires -- Citizen Ruth
(1996) and Election
(1999) -- and one wants to respond to About Schmidt as
some sort of comment on the emptiness of a lifelong company man
whose routine is doubly shattered when he finds himself minus
an occupation and a wife. If the road trip is supposed to give
Warren a sense of purpose, as a murder gave Nicholson's retired
cop in The Pledge renewed vigor, it doesn't seem to. Warren
holds everything in; the only person he opens up to is Ndugu,
a six-year-old African boy he's sponsoring by mail. Along with
his $22 monthly checks, he sends letters to Ndugu in which his
seething resentment of his life is at odds with the neutrally
dyspeptic face he wears around everyone else.
Mostly, the satire here amounts
to nudging us into feeling superior to other people's lives.
There are also crude touches like a urine motif: Warren bitterly
celebrates his new independence by pissing on the toilet seat;
the next time we see him relieving himself it's after he's made
a speech of glowing tribute to the newlyweds, a lie to make his
daughter happy on her wedding day. Payne's cold eye freezes our
responses when he tries for warmth. What are we supposed to make
of the sexually liberated mother-of-the-groom, played by Kathy
Bates in her usual let's-cut-the-crap mode? Bates, easily the
best element of the movie, represents what Warren recoils from
-- spontaneity, outspokenness -- because he sorely lacks it,
but Payne undercuts her in subtle ways by clothing her in gauche
outfits, or by not clothing her at all.
Through this aimless movie
drifts Nicholson, a flabby balloon full of toxic self-hate. This
performance is a mere faint echo of the sharp self-loathing he
lacerated us with in The Crossing Guard. Nicholson's
films with Sean Penn show him as a real actor still capable of
surprise. About Schmidt is just Jack coasting in a role
as tailor-made for him as the neurotic Melvin Udall in As
Good As It Gets. You may recall that for his audience-tickling
efforts in that film, Nicholson grabbed his third Oscar; he may
well get a fourth for the audience-reassuring Warren Schmidt,
whose pain at wasting his life is vague enough not to scare anyone
off and distant enough from Nicholson himself -- who celebrates
his forty-fifth year of film acting this year -- to let us know
he's just playing a part that has nothing to do with him.
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