About Schmidt (2002)

	Sign In Sign-Up

About Schmidt(2002)

Bashing the emptiness of American life

This is about as un-Nicholson as Jack Nicholson can get, but it's a smart piece of work that could have soured easily in the hands of a lesser performer. Nicholson is Warren Schmidt, a recently retired insurance man who finds himself all of the sudden with gobs of time on his hands and nothing to fill it but his inane wife of 42 years Helen (June Squibb) and a luxurious office in which he can do word jumbles. Dandy.

Once Helen dies, however, Schmidtt finds himself untethered and questioning his entire life, right up to every second he's currently living. Two weeks after Helen's death, Schmidt is a mess, his house looks like a sequel to Animal House, and he finds himself pouring out letter after letter to his foster child and unseen confessor Nugabu, adopted through a Save-a-Child foundation. The letters begin rolling, and Schmidt's self-revelations roll right along with them. Add to that daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) and her plans to marry Denver buffoon waterbed salesman Randall (Dermot Mulroney) and Schmidt becomes a repressed well-to-do who outdoes even Lester Burnam in American Beauty. He finally decides to jump in his Winnebago and drive out to Denver to stop his daughter's marriage, taking several Midwestern tour trips along the way.

Schmidt gets into more trouble than is perhaps believable in places (at one point he buries his face in a Wisconsin wife's bosom only to try and mash faces with her after her show of sympathy), but for the most part his meanderings, poker faces and helplessness in his various situations draw quite the belly laugh. Kathy Bates is hysterical as Roberta, Schmidt's future relative and Jeannie's future mother-in-law, who delivers diatribes against her ex-husband and feels Schmidt up in the hottub with the same affability. Mulroney is excellent as well--every time doofus Randall takes center stage, its usually to demonstrate his complete hamhandedness, performed with just the right amount of subtlety. Ten minutes with this guy and his attempt to get Warren in on a business deal right in the middle of Helen's funeral arrangements is utterly believable. "People keep saying its a pyramid scheme," he says, looking more and more like Christopher Guest in This Is Spinal Tap with every word, "and I'm like...it's not!"

It is Nicholson, however, who delivers the film's momentum, of course, and he is everything a great actor needs to be for this role. Through facial mannerisms alone, his frustration and emptiness threaten to spill out and knock all of the dysfunction around him clear out of the sky. This carries the film up until its final heart-rending and completely satisfactory ending, and could very well garner Nicholson another permanent caricature, right alongside Randall Patrick McMurphy (Cuckoo's Nest) and Jack Torrance (The Shining).

Note: The DVD, while containing a sufficient amount of extraneous material, has the worst method of commentary on deleted scenes I've ever seen. You know how Kevin Smith talks too much? Well director Alexander Payne says probably half as much, but because he delivers it all through non-scrolling text, it takes twice as long to say it. Make sure the fast-forward button works when reading all that junk, most of which takes the trouble to mention that "the highway cop in Omaha, Nebraska, is played by a highway cop in Lincoln, Nebraska" or "the waitress in the coffee shop is a real waitress but in a different coffee shop." You get the idea.

-Long