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About Schmidt (22-May-2002)
Director: Alexander Payne Writers: Alexander Payne; Jim Taylor From a novel by: Louis Begley Keywords: Comedy, Drama, Wedding, Road Trip
REVIEWS Featured review by Mark Tapio Kines: Longtime Omaha, Nebraska resident Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) is an ordinary old man who, finding himself retired and widowed, discovers that he had only defined himself by his job and his marriage. With them gone, he fears his life is meaningless. Eventually he decides on an impromptu road trip out to Denver, ostensibly to revisit the places of his past but actually to try to stop his only child (Hope Davis) from marrying a complete loser (Dermot Mulroney). A very simple story that is perhaps too blunt about the life of a retired Nebraskan widower to be thoroughly entertaining by itself, About Schmidt is a testament to Jack Nicholson's star power. He is practically a one-man show here, playing against type and succeeding. There's no way you can avoid chuckling at that famous smirk, those pointed eyebrows, but the movie plays with our expectations of the actor more than once, aware that it takes someone as larger-than-life as Nicholson to make us interested in, and love, an otherwise boring old man. Payne (with cowriter Jim Taylor, his collaborator on Citizen Ruth and Election) once again uses his hometown of Omaha as the standard model for bleakest Middle America, and his take on modern western life remains pointed, though it's far less savage and more bittersweet than its predecessors. For example, the wedding rehearsal dinner is held at a Tony Roma's franchise. It's a funny gag until you realize that a lot of American families who don't have much money (or much choice) probably have their wedding rehearsal dinners at Tony Roma's, and then it isn't funny anymore. The film is full of such quietly depressing moments that remind us, as they do Schmidt, that we live in a culture that's all too ready to provide us with meaninglessness. But About Schmidt does have a healthy share of laughs, and a marvelous ending that redeems the two hours that preceded it, although by the time credits rolled most audience members were walking out with "Is that it?" looks on their faces. But the film has stuck with me longer than I expected. It's always the quiet ones, isn't it?
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