In a way, 'About Schmidt' is the flip-side of 'It’s a Wonderful Life'
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
Ignore the buzz. Kathy Bates in a hot tub isn´t the most interesting thing in "About Schmidt." It´s the road trip Jack Nicholson´s character makes, which, for fans of Nicholson, will feel like a sad Winnebago reprisal of the motorcycle adventure he took as a young actor in "Easy Rider" (1969). Besides, moviegoers got nearly the same glimpse of Bates in "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" (1991), when she had essentially the same body. And what´s braver, hot-tubbing with the flabby Nicholson, or baring it all in a film where a young Daryll Hannah does the same?
In "About Schmidt," Nicholson plays actuary/insurance exec Warren Schmidt, whose retirement precipitates a late-life crisis. It doesn´t help that his wife, Helen (June Squibb), is a fussy, older-acting woman who insisted they buy a Winnebago in which to tour the country, or that her idea of adventure is having bran for breakfast inside the monster while it´s still parked in their driveway. And it certainly doesn´t help that she dies almost immediately, rendering Nicholson, from that point on, as vacant-eyed and slack-jawed as he was at the end of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo´s Nest." His young and chipper replacement doesn´t need him, he realizes after one pathetic return to his old office, and his daughter doesn´t care much for him, he learns when she and her fiancé come for the funeral. Apparently, Dad devoted more time to Woodmen of the World Insurance Co. of Omaha than he did to his little Jeannie (Hope Davis). Now that he finally gets around to caring about her forthcoming wedding (one which Mom had been planning with her all along) and decides that Randall (Dermot Mulroney) is a Bozo, he wants to somehow figure out how to tell her she could do better. But who is he to say? Before his wife of 42 years passed away, Schmidt could think of nothing except how old, how annoying, and how much a stranger she was to him. They lead separate lives in the same house, illustrated by Schmidt´s secret adoption of a Tanzanian foster child after watching a Childreach commercial on television.
The rest of the film follows Schmidt as he drives from campground to campground en route to Denver, where his daughter and the groom-to-be´s family reside. Along the way, he stops at his childhood home (now a tire shop) and alma mater (where he tries to "hang" with frat brothers), and hooks up with a Winnebago-loving couple at a trailer park in a scene reminiscent of Nicholson´s much-earlier pot-smoking dalliance with two hippies on bikes—only this time, it´s a shared six-pack. The performances are strong, and Nicholson turns in a qualified gem. Here´s the qualification: the role doesn´t allow him his usual range of expression, and this road film is plodding at times, with the character development stuck in idle. Moments of release masquerade as epiphanies, but Schmidt´s basic mindset and the underlying tone of this film remains relatively constant.
"About Schmidt" could have easily been titled "Dear Ndugu," because, as in "The Color Purple," we get a sense of the narrator´s inner self through a series of letters, penned, in this case, not to God, but to the six-year-old foster child he´s been assigned. The letters reveal not only Schmidt´s grief and sense of having wasted his life, but also his basic inability to communicate, and the depth of his own self-absorption. Nicholson is always a pleasure to watch, but even that pleasure grows tiresome with so little variation over the course of this journey. As a matter of fact, none of the characters in this Alexander Payne-directed film are very likeable. Schmidt´s late wife WAS annoying, the daughter, who holds a grudge and cuts him no slack, is equally self-centered, her milquetoast intended isn´t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, Randall´s mother (Bates) is a bully of an ex-hippy, the young man´s father (Howard Hesseman) is a walking illustration of where Randall will be in thirty years, and Schmidt´s best friend turns out not to have been not the best afterall. So if the theme is About Losers, there are plenty of case studies to go around.
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]11333[/release]