About Jack : About Schmidt

by Cynthia Fuchs

It's hard to take your eyes off Warren Schmidt. Partly this is because he's played by Jack Nicholson (around whom fourth Oscar talk is already swirling), partly because he's in just about every scene of Alexander Payne's About Schmidt. And partly, it's because he's so utterly, calculatedly ordinary. And this is the mesmeric car-crashness of the role and the movie. There's no way that Jack Nicholson can play ordinary, so his many moments on screen become spectacular representations of ordinary, simulations of same.

As the film begins, Schmidt is retiring after some 40 years as an actuary for Woodmen of the World Insurance in Omaha. Schmidt seems, at first, a dull man, not particularly looking forward to the road trip he and his wife Helen (June Squibb) have planned (having purchased a Winnebago), but also not interested in coming up with another idea. Feted by his equally dull fellow workers at a restaurant dinner, he wanders off from the wholly depressing and meaningless proceedings and orders a vodka gimlet at the bar, where he sips it, alone.

Over the years, 66-year old Schmidt has grown fond of his isolation and his habits, even as he has grown exquisitely resentful of them. Once ambitious and even hopeful as a young man, he has long since given in to inertia -- working the same job, married to the same woman, living in the same house, and drinking the same vodka, for decades. He and Helen share a quiet torpor: she makes his lunch and cleans the house; he grimaces at her snoring and can't stand that she makes him sit to pee. He can't imagine life without her.

When you meet Schmidt, he doesn't know this about himself. But you do, because the film provides a neat device to reveal Schmidt's innermost thoughts: letters. And he's not writing to just anyone, a friend with whom he might share assumptions or even his U.S. citizen's sense of privilege. He's writing to Ndugu, a Tanzanian boy he's supporting for $22 a month through "Child Reach," one of those tv campaigns that tug at couch potato heartstrings (this one features Angela Lansbury). Schmidt's resilient ignorance regarding Ndugu's daily existence provides the film with fuel for humor, and grants Schmidt a chance to vent. That is, they grant you a way inside his ostensibly thick skull.

You Know Jack. "The comedy comes in Nicholson's affect and tone. It wouldn't be so funny to hear just any ordinary grouch complaining about his wife's idiosyncrasies to a starving 6-year-old."

Each of these letters begins in the same way: "Dear Ndugu," says Schmidt (in Nicholson's flat, eternally bored intonation), before he launches into a completely inappropriate diatribe, against his wife, his daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis), his daughter's waterbed salesman fiancé Randall Hertzel (Dermot Mulroney), even the veins on his ankles and sagging skin around his neck that mark his age. On occasion, he suggests that Ndugu might run down to the store to buy candy with the check he's cashing, but most of the time, Schmidt is so focused on his own misery that he doesn't consider Ndugu.

This relationship -- so one-sided and myopic -- becomes About Schmidt's most complicated and difficult subject, as it is at once revealing and painfully hilarious. The comedy comes in Nicholson's affect and tone. It wouldn't be so funny to hear just any ordinary grouch complaining about his wife's idiosyncrasies to a starving 6-year-old. The joke arises in it being Jack Nicholson, Mr. Extraordinary, who has made a career out of turning his own considerable stature and weight into dark and/or wry comedy in, for obvious instances, The Shining (1980), Prizzi's Honor (1985), Wolf (1994), Mars Attacks! (1996), and As Good As It Gets (1997). At the same time, Nicholson is so plainly not as dim as Schmidt appears to be (or has talked himself into being), that it seems inevitable that Schmidt's light bulb will eventually click on.

It does, by way of that Winnebago trip, which Schmidt ends up taking alone, because Helen dies of an aneurysm just weeks after his retirement party. He's gone, mailing his first letter to Ndugu, and the last words she says to him are, "Don't dilly-dally." On his return, Schmidt finds Helen collapsed on the floor. Jeannie and Randall arrive for the funeral, and seeing them together -- she his little girl grown up and not a little sour, he the amiable dufus who's moved her to Denver -- and it strikes Schmidt that Randall is "just not up to snuff." Soon, he's writing another letter, "Dear Ndugu, I have bad news."

Schmidt is suddenly feeling overwhelmed by the lack of activity in his life, where before, this seemed a right, to do nothing, and kvetch about Helen's "obsession with trying new restaurants" to boot. Now, he takes to the road, at first to "see" what's out there, then to make his way to Denver, in an effort, he thinks, to stop his beloved daughter from marrying a man Schmidt believes is beneath her. His lack of perspective takes various forms: he has no clear vision of what's "beneath, or what he wants, or what Jeannie needs. But he decides that traveling west might improve his sense of things, his place in the world and his ability to see it.

The New York Times Magazine has recently deemed Payne "The Bard of Omaha," for his trio of movies that draw from his own Midwestern experiences. Like Payne's previous two movies, Schmidt is co-written with Jim Taylor, but this time, they are working from a novel, by Louis Begley, set in the Hamptons and featuring a cast of wealthy characters. But where Citizen Ruth and Election offered comically acute critiques of multiple characters, the new movie is more intently focused on its protagonist, using secondary characters as broadly drawn framing devices (that said, several of the actors, in particular Davis and Mulroney, bring welcome depths to their performances).

More Morphizm

"I applaud My Big Fat Greek Wedding for avoiding a sickeningly cute Meg Ryan/Julia Roberts cipher gumming it up for the camera or a surgically-altered Pamela Lee/Carmen Electra bimbo slutting it up for the camera."

"You can make nicely crafted things, whether they're poems, sculptures, paintings, records, CDs, whatever. But they'll just be that -- nice. They won't be unwieldy as personal expression often can be."

"I think that there's been a lot of difficulty in defining what is American, what is considered American. There's a lot of difficulty with acceptance within our community of foreignness at this time."

"I think that there's something in the American psyche, it's almost this kind of right or privilege, this sense of entitlement, to resolve our conflicts with violence. There's an arrogance to that concept if you think about it. To actually have to sit down and talk, to listen, to compromise, that's hard work."

In one such instance, Schmidt meets John and Vicki (Harry Groener and Connie Ray), fellow travelers who, thinking he's lonely, invite him over to their Winnebago for dinner. When John heads off to get more beer, Schmidt falls headfirst into his own solipsistic void. Mistaking Vicki's friendliness for romantic (or at least sexual) interest, he tries to kiss her, and she throws him out in a panic. The scene is awkward and strange, even somewhat pathetic, but mostly, it shows his absolute lost-in-spaceness. Schmidt doesn't know how to read, respond to, or treat other people. Like the distant 6-year-old to whom he describes each week's events, he's only aware of his own desires and needs.

Schmidt's (lack of) perspective is subjected to still more rearrangement when he reaches Denver and meets Randall's family, in particular, his mother, Roberta (Kathy Bates). Loud, aggressive, and gracious enough to provide Schmidt with a dose of Percodan when he wakes after a night in a waterbed with a back so "out" that he's unable to move, Roberta is as at home in her surroundings as Schmidt is not (Bates lends her a perverse grace that doesn't appear to be written). Her expansive personality and terrible, tacky costumes make her an easy object of ridicule, and at first you're inclined to share Schmidt's complete disdain for her and the rest of the Hertzel clan, including her ex (Howard Hesseman).

But soon, his panic that Jeannie is marrying into this clan is turned back on him, and he sees at last, how limited his view has been -- of himself, of Jeannie, and of Helen. That his eye-opening doesn't necessarily change his options makes Schmidt more like Ndugu than he might imagine, and not only because he remains willfully, self-preservingly unable to imagine much of anything about Ndugu.

16 December 02