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ABOUT
SCHMIDT
6/10
USA 2002 : Alexander PAYNE : 124-5 mins
Film
stars are different from ordinary people in too many ways to count, but
one thing that divides us and them is that they don’t have to leave
work when they reach pensionable age. The likes of Beatty, Eastwood, Connery
and Jack Nicholson will probably soldier on till they drop, which makes
it slightly ironic that Nicholson’s last two movies – who turned 65 in
2002 – both begin on their main character’s retirement day, featuring
parties they’d much rather not attend. But while The
Pledge was all about the reluctance of its cop hero to face up
to the empty existence looming ahead, Payne’s second feature (after the
bafflingly overrated Election) presents retirement as a
galvanising force - Schmidt becomes suddenly aware how much precious time
he’s already frittered away during his long years of service as an insurance
actuary in Omaha, Nebraska.
“Life
is short,” he decides one day, slumped in front of the TV, “and I can’t
afford to waste another minute.” But just when we’re groaning at the predictability
of this resolution, Payne cuts to Schmidt, ‘two weeks later’, slumped
in a near-identical position. This sums up Payne’s approach - his script
(co-written with Jim Taylor and loosely based on Louis Begley’s novel)
isn’t afraid to embrace cliched ideas, nor even to seem patronising towards
some of its characters. But this is all part of the film’s manipulation
of expectations, building to an intelligent, humanistic view of modern
social and family relationships.
Retirement
isn’t the only life-changing event experienced by Schmidt as he turns
66 – when his wife Helen (June Squibb) dies suddenly, he finds love-letters
which reveal her affair with one of his supposed best friends. This strengthens
his conviction that his only daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) is making a
big mistake by planning to marry used-car salesman Randall Hertzel (Dermot
Mulroney) a man he considers “not up to snuff.” He sets off for distant
Denver, Colorado in the ‘Winnebago’ mobile home his wife had insisted
they buy, revisiting key places from his life along the way. Arriving
in Denver, he’s further turned off Randall when he meets the raucous Hertzel
family, dominated by free-spirit divorcee Roberta (Kathy Bates). His heartfelt
request that Jeannie think again, however, falls on very stony ground…
With
Nicholson in the role, we wait in eager anticipation for Schmidt to explode
into the ‘Jack’ persona familiar from so many previous movies – the wedding
reception, where he’s to speak as the father of the bride, would seem
an ideal time to vent his barely-suppressed dissatisfactions at life in
general and Randall in particular. Randall is not presented in a positive
light: bizarrely coiffured and moustachioed, and prone to severe financial
mismanagement, he and his family seem ripe targets for the expected Nicholson
ire. But it never happens – while Schmidt never wavers from his view of
Randall as a ‘nincompoop’, he bites his tongue, finally realising that
all that matters is that his daughter (a fogeyish sort who we see is no
saint herself) loves her husband, probably more than Schmidt himself ever
actually loved his spouse.
Payne
and Taylor’s strongest suit is the avoidance of easy options – while none
of the main characters are especially sympathetic, neither do they deserve
scorn. This is film about ordinary, middle-class, relatively affluent
residents of the USA, and Schmidt’s Omaha-to-Denver trajectory couldn’t
be much more ‘middle-American’: the details of dialogue, décor and costume
are just right, even as they occasionally threaten to hover on the edge
of caricature. Though he handles the transition from the first half’s
wry amusement to the later sections’ more physical, belly-laugh comedy
fairly well, Payne the director doesn’t do many favours to Payne the writer.
This is a film which even the semi-antique, MOR Schmidt might criticise
as unimaginatively brought to the screen, with many tired techniques such
as the sound of children’s voices appearing on the soundtrack when Schmidt
visits his birthplace.
There is one bonus to this hackneyed touch – it means for a moment we don’t
have to listen to Rolfe Kent’s incessant, distracting, insultingly over-the-top
score. Whatever his other limitations, Payne certainly gets his money’s
worth out of Nicholson – true to the film’s title, he wisely uses the
actor prominently in nearly every scene, and there’s also copious voice-over
narration as Schmidt composes letters to his unseen African foster child,
Ndugu. It’s a slightly awkward mechanism for allowing us to ‘hear’ Schmidt’s
inner thoughts, but there’s an unexpectedly moving pay-off when, in the
very final scene Schmidt receives a letter from Ndugu, written
by a nun at his camp and including a crayon drawing that reduces the character
– and probably a fair proportion of the audience – to tears.
26th March, 2003
(seen 22nd March, Odeon Bradford)
by Neil
Young
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