The Travels of Schmidt. Review on About Schmidt Movie

The blistering irony and torture of retirement seems (and if not, should be) more dreadfully anticipated with the onslaught of modern technology nowadays; the banality of diminutive details, the festering state of habitual absurdity, and the heartache of life’s cruel rotting, doesn’t help either. Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt deals with these facets on the sardonic limbs of brutal honesty and subversive gibe, and that it knows this almost too well divulges something disturbing. Payne, along with co-writer Jim Taylor (adapted the screenplay from Louis Begley’s novel), who are responsible for both the hilarious Election and the numbing Jurassic Park III (partly writing-wise), again find the ironic and heartbreaking tone set in their seemingly political efforts: the aforementioned Election and sub-par Citizen Ruth. Analogously About Schmidt is almost political but in an entirely different fashion, exteriorly it deals with a road trip but in nuance it announces a dark comment on late/mid American retirees’ places in the American system, their loneliness, their desolation, and finally, their dissolution.

While not as visually enthusiastic as, say, Wes Anderson (Payne’s counterpart), both of whom are in quite a similar vein of disdain for anti-intellectualism and Midwestern ennui, which accounts for the slight minor in the tableaux’s commonplace, this distracts little from the film’s preponderance. Actually in overlooking a bawdy artificial design the film creates an effectual rhetoric and verisimilitude of bittersweet comportments, discussing the rustic quality of the Midwestern landscape. Though not superficially contradictory in terms of the movie, the characters are a tragic composition of acetic wastefulness and hollowness. The breathtaking aspect of About Schmidt and all its truthful absurdity is the realization process the protagonist has thrust upon him.

Warren R. Schmidt (a phenomenal Jack Nicholson who, along with Al Pacino, should impart advice to their fallen contemporaries, i.e. Robert De Niro) is an insignificant insurance employee of the Woodmen Company in Omaha, Nebraska retiring after years of service at the age of 66. He sits in a nondescript office, clockwatching in a particularly poignant opening, highlighting a dryness of Midwestern life. At his retirement party he sits in a hopeless façade accompanied by disapproving but cheery Helen (June Squibb), his cardboard grandmother of a wife who soon dies a few days into his retirement.

Her untimely passing triggers a mixed reaction for Warren, friends give their empty condolences and his engaged-to-be-married daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) comes to her father’s aid with nincompoopish but well-meaning fiancé Randall (Dermot Mulroney), though Warren finds his source for venting in letters to a six-year-old African boy called N’Dugu, whom he’s “adopted” from one of those guilt-inspiring TV charity ads. When he soon finds the loneliness unbearable and his wife’s age-old secret treacherous he takes to an impulsive road trip, visiting nostalgic spots in an enormous Winnebago Adventurer, and eventually arriving at his daughter’s wedding with the hopes of preventing it, only to be bombarded by the groom’s loon of a free spirited mother (a superb Kathy Bates.)

That Nicholson disappears into the role is not an exaggeration. Long have we known the rambunctious antics of his Randle P. McMurphy and Buddusky, the slick coolness of Jake Gittes, and his various professional shysters, but here we’re allowed a resource-less man-shell. Schmidt has no compelling talents or interests other than his yearning for routine and finding commonality in a mutually beneficial relationship of emotionless agreeableness. This dictates (as he sorrowfully realizes) his existence as pointless when released from his Woodmen position and further catastrophic the day his wife kicks the bucket. The characters portrayed ambivalence, powerlessness and melancholy is a stunning deification of Nicholson’s real talents. And the character an epitomizing of aimless voyager, racked with his sense of failure and guilt of having never appreciated what he had.

About Schmidt’s emotional wallop is a fairly sentimental one but nonetheless one done utterly correct and with affecting truth. In a gallant but humorous manner it conveys a kind of weariness of elderly life with its intended and deserved reverence. Oppositely, the senility and handicapping curse inevitably forced upon the elderly entity depicts Schmidt frequently as blithering and misguided as Nicholson’s Jerry Black in Sean Penn’s The Pledge. Though the theme may seem frighteningly simplistic and crude the means About Schmidt utilizes for exhibiting its message and theme are sublimely lucrative, if not brilliant. If Larry Clarke’s Kids was a startling wake-up call to middle-aged America on their youths’ reckless abandon then About Schmidt is the appropriate rude awakening for young America on their elders’ yearning of reckless abandon.