About Schmidt is writer-director Alexander Payne’s first movie since Election, and if you’re looking for the caustic wit and ironic manner of Election, keep on going. Schmidt is kind of Payne’s version of The Straight Story, except with the aforementioned monstrosity instead of a lawn mower for transportation. That’s just a superficial comparison, though (made mostly because it gave me the chance to bitch again about the RV); Schmidt is a funnier movie, and the main character actually changes from the beginning to the end – in a refreshingly schmaltz-free way.
I think it creates unfair and incorrect expectations for the movie to put Jack Nicholson in it, but he’s extraordinary. I can’t tell if it was his acting talent or if it was just that he deviated so radically from his usual characters. Warren Schmidt is an unremarkable, salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner, just retired from a career at a life insurance company. He is … edgeless. No tough-guy smirks, no ironic eyebrow arching, no sardonic retorts. Nicholson looks old; he looks just like a man whose life has been safe and steady but never exciting. A master of the polite, frozen smile, mild, resigned, a bit bewildered at how the years have gotten away from him, Schmidt finds liberation through painful, life-altering events that jolt him onto the road (in that corpulent atrocity to nature), trying to stop his daughter’s wedding to a painfully earnest dolt. (Personally, I think a road trip in a solar car could be just as liberating, maybe even more so because you wouldn’t be killing the planet.)
The dolt is waterbed salesman Randall (the entertaining Dermot Mulroney, sporting a balding head and a ponytail), who swings between wide-eyed new ageism and smarmy salesmanship, with the odd lapse into Keanu Reevesism. Unfathomably, Schmidt’s daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) is marrying the twit. Davis comes off like a strident sourpuss, but as you see glimpses of the backstory of Jeannie’s relationship with her father, well, she has a point.
The comedy is sometimes too broad, especially with Randall’s mother (Kathy Bates), a hippie earth mother with a longshoreman’s mouth, who’s really just a caricature. Not that she and the other easy shots (like the golly-gee couple Schmidt meets at an RV park, one of whom is played by the mayor of Sunnydale from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) didn’t make me laugh, but they seemed out of place in this otherwise restrained, understated film (understated except when it comes to VEHICLES). Nicholson is good at making the physical gags seem hard; in other words, making them look like the unhappy flailings of a 60-year-old man mortified at his loss of dignity.
Aside from those occasional silly leaps, the film is a well-modulated blend of melancholy and comedy (I refuse to use the word “dramedy”). Perfectly illustrating its bittersweet (another word I don’t like because of how often and lazily it’s used, like “feel-good” and “heart-warming,” but I can’t find a synonym for it in my thesaurus) balance are the letters Schmidt writes to a Tanzanian boy he’s “adopted” through one of those Sally Struthers “save the children” agencies. They function more as a journal for him as he digresses into stream-of-consciousness diatribes that are both hilarious and sad. And you’ve seen Nicholson be funny, but when have you seen him cry?
If you can get past the obscene waste of fuel and the annoyance
to other
drivers of that sickening RV (and I’m guessing most of you can unless,
like me, you are not only a big-time, self-righteous environmentalist
but
also have been stuck behind behemoth RVs in Yellowstone
and Yosemite and
beautiful,
narrow, twisty mountain roads that would have been so much more fun at
50 mph than at 20), About Schmidt is a sweet, low-key
movie.
And do I even need to mention that there were annoying people talking around me? If you ever doubted that I am a karmic magnet for talkers, here is absolute proof. I won tickets a little while ago to a concert by Mísia, a Portuguese fado singer. Let me stress that the only decisions I made were to enter the contest and to attend the concert. This is not something about which you can say that I chose a place to sit or otherwise took any action that would affect who my neighbors were. I had assigned seats (very good ones, too – just a few rows back and on the aisle. If I were any good at spitting and if I were very rude, I could have spit on the singer). Fairly esoteric concert, and you would think anyone who was there had a particular interest in fado or in Mísia and therefore would want to listen to the music. And most of them did. Except the college-kid couple in front of me (the male half of whom had a gargantuan head that perpetually blocked my view so that I had to lean way out in the aisle and then swing back while he was necking with his girlfriend). Anyway, for the first twenty minutes or so, they restricted their yapping to in between songs, although this meant not only during the applause but also while the singer was talking about how much this song meant to her or the cultural importance of fado. Then, during what was otherwise a marvelous piece from the band while Mísia was off stage, they talked through the music and kept it up for the rest of the concert. I so much wanted to lean between them and say, “Hey kids, I have an idea. Let’s play the Quiet Game. If you can go the rest of the concert without saying anything, I’ll give you each a shiny new quarter!” An 8- or 9-year-old girl was sitting across the aisle from the Chatty Cathies, and she was better behaved than they. She spoke to her parents only during applause intervals and sat quietly without fidgeting even when she was awake. I sorely wanted to ask her to tell the yappy pappies whatever her parents had told her about how well-mannered people behave at concerts.
My point is that this is a universe thing. I did something mean and bad sometime, in this life or another, and my punishment is that rude people will be drawn to me. Or maybe the universe is just being a jerk, like the kid who sat behind me in some of my eighth-grade classes and poked me in the back with a newly sharpened pencil every day whenever he was bored in class.
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