Starring: Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates and Dermot Mulroney
Director: Alexander Payne
Rated: M15+
IN his satirical high school comedy, Election, with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick, director Alexander Payne showed a sensitive and incisive talent for the foibles of human nature.
In About Schmidt, he moves to retirement and old age with an even stronger sensitivity.
Jack Nicholson, acting slightly over his real age, gives one of his best and most restrained, even understated, performances, bringing to life a Nebraska insurance actuary, Warren Schmidt, who finds himself on the verge of retiring and who has to cope with not being needed, with vast amounts of time, with the death of his wife and the impending marriage of his daughter to a man he labels (when polite) a nincompoop.
With a wealth of intimate detail, Payne and Nicholson give us a portrait of an ordinary everyday man who is forced to revisit his life, reassess his judgments on people,and learn forgiveness and some tolerance as he asks himself the question whether his life has made any difference to anyone.
Hope Davis, as his daughter, brings an edge of melancholic realism to her role (as she did in a similar vein in Hearts of Atlantis).
An almost unrecognisable Dermot Mulroney plays Randall as less than a nincompoop than Schmidt would admit, but still not the brightest. Kathy Bates again shows her versatility as Mulroney’s free-spirited and surprisingly uninhibited mother.
The device of having Warren pour out his soul in letters to the six year-old Tanzanian child he is sponsoring is dramatically risky. Nicholson, however, avoids all sentimentality as he speaks the letters aloud. In fact, they are the device whereby we really learn the truth about Schmidt.
Funny, with touches of caricature, sad, and a moving picture of an uneventful life.
