"About Schmidt"

Despite Jack Nicholson's competence, this comedy about a Midwestern retiree never goes beyond mocking its characters and flattering its audience.

By Charles Taylor

Dec. 13, 2002 | For all the combinations of tone and style that movies have indulged in, I can't think of one that has attempted smug poignancy (or is it poignant smugness?). That's the tone of "About Schmidt," adapted by director Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from Louis Begley's novel. Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson, is a 66-year-old insurance executive who, after his retirement, finds he has nothing in his life, no identity outside his work, nothing in common with Helen (June Squibb), his wife of 42 years.

When Helen suddenly dies, Schmidt takes off in his new Winnebago, revisiting places from his past and going to others he's always wanted to see. His final destination is Denver, where his daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) is to be married to Randall (Dermot Mulroney), a mullet-wearing waterbed dealer who combines the New Age dippiness of his aging hippie mother (Kathy Bates) with the sleazy cravenness of a born snake-oil salesman. (Helen is barely in the ground before Randall tries to get Schmidt to go in on a pyramid scheme.)

The most promising thing in Payne's first movie, "Citizen Ruth," was a first-time director's willingness to take potshots at both sides of the abortion controversy. Payne seemed to understand that a satirist shouldn't be anybody's friend. That willingness didn't look so good in his next picture, the widely praised "Election." I laughed a lot at "Election," but I hated myself for it afterward. Payne's satirical gibes had become too easy, too pleased with themselves. The movie invited the audience to flatter itself (as "Citizen Ruth" didn't) when it laughed at the poor, pathetic schmucks it put on-screen. There was never a moment when we were implicated in the laughter.

Like far too much contemporary American movie comedy, "About Schmidt" is all about flattering the audience. A drab visual insult, James Glennon's cinematography is about reducing the Midwest to strip malls and ugly downtowns, overbright superstores and anonymous tracts of suburbs. Here, we are being told, is the land of dullness and convention and routine, where everything has a deadening sameness. Even before you see them, you anticipate the twin La-Z-Boy loungers in the TV room, the floral-pattern bedroom wallpaper, the Sears family portrait on a young executive's desk, the heavy mahogany paneling in the town's "classy" restaurant. That Schmidt, for all his reluctance to question things and all his surface complacency, starts to sense that deadness makes him largely exempt from Payne's target practice.

Schmidt is meant to be the movie's Everyman -- or something like that, and his road trip is the movie's voyage of discovery. Early on in the movie, Schmidt watches a TV ad soliciting people to sponsor poor children in Third World countries. He sends a check and winds up sponsoring a little African boy named Ndugu. Payne uses Schmidt's letters to Ndugu, read by Nicholson in voiceover, as the character's inner monologues. They are full of Schmidt's disappointments and repressed anger, as well as his complaints about Helen, the type of woman who scolds, "Don't dilly-dally," when he goes out to run an errand. The inappropriateness of writing these letters to a distant 6-year-old boy who can't even read is the movie's running gag. Up to a point.

Payne is, of course, making fun of the way child-relief organizations use advertising to guilt-trip people into making contributions. But he ends up using Ndugu in much the same way, as a little symbol of unexpected brotherhood for the audience to grow misty over. Payne only wants us to laugh at some of the clichés here. Other people's sentimentality and bad taste are there for the audience's snarky laughter. He is much more indulgent toward his own sentimentality. It's OK to laugh when some church vocalist sings Dan Fogelberg at Jeannie and Randall's wedding, or when a campground tourist (Harry Groener) gets all moony over a new top-of-the-line Winnebago. But when Schmidt watches a falling star he believes is a sign from Helen, or when he breaks into tears from a crayon drawing that little Ndugu sends him of a man and boy holding hands, well, we're supposed to fill up, too.

Part of what may make that acceptable to some viewers and critics is that it's coming from Jack Nicholson, whose off-screen persona is still unimpeachably hip (they wouldn't buy it from, say, Kevin Costner). Payne is well aware of the novelty of seeing Nicholson play an average, unimaginative Midwesterner. To his credit, Nicholson stays in character throughout the movie. There's just one flash of his famous smile and one fleeting use of those quotation-mark eyebrows of his. He doesn't aggrandize Schmidt, or ridicule him. He understands the man's trouble with expressing emotion, his acceptance of convention, his resistance to questioning the way things are. It's a respectable performance.

Next page: How can critics fall for this kind of sentimentality and hypocrisy?