2002’s About Schmidt is an interesting, funny and often heart-warming character study starring Jack Nicholson and directed by Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways). The film is based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Louis Begley, but it doesn’t share many of the details of the book. The film is a rich and resonating character study guided by one of Hollywood’s true greats in Nicholson. His performance in this film is tremendous, as he unlocks the keys to subtle acting charm and quiet reserved tenderness all at once, creating a character that resonates deeply in some way with many of us.
The film begins with the retirement of Schmidt from his position as actuary in an insurance company in Nebraska. Schmidt finds it hard to adjust to his new life and starts to feel useless. One evening, he is watching a TV ad about a foster program for African children. Schmidt’s wife also suddenly dies, creating a void within that the simple man can’t quite figure out. He enters the sponsorship program and soon receives an information package with a photo of his foster child, a small boy named Ndugu, to whom he relates his life in self-centric letters. The main narrative of the film follows Schmidt as he goes on a road trip in order to attend the wedding of his daughter to a man and family he doesn’t particularly like at all.
The film takes a realistic and textured look at the situation of loneliness, as we are guided through a portion of Schmidt’s life in which he begins to realize that what he has accomplished really had no bearing on how he would be treated and how much of an impact his life had actually made. Schmidt becomes a lonely, desperate man and he reaches out to anything and anyone that can provide him with some meaning. His letters to his African sponsored child indicate a hunger for companionship and for another crack at “fatherhood”, while his relationship with his daughter indicate a lack of understanding of lifestyles different from his.
The film is a dark comedy, for the most part, ripping much of its humor from the ingrown hilarity in normative human situations. It is not an overt or obvious film in any way and requires patience from the viewer, much like Broken Flowers or Lost in Translation. There is a lot of time in About Schmidt that is dedicated to merely “taking it all in” as we assess scenes with Payne’s camera work instead of with cluttered dialogue. We view the Schmidt home, for example, with a slow sweeping camera shot across the main room. When Schmidt loses his wife, we view the same home but now with a natural sense of inevitable chaos.
The film also takes different speeds, alternating between getting lost in Schmidt’s moments of inactivity in front of the TV screen to getting swept up in maddening moments involving the family of the man Schmidt’s daughter plans to marry. Kathy Bates is wondrous here as a promiscuous but understanding mother-in-law to be to Jeannie, Schmidt’s daughter (Hope Davis).
Unlike other films, Payne’s About Schmidt chooses not to utilize “normal looking people” as objects of humor but rather as objects of tenderness. Nicholson is real here, not swaggering or creating some sort of impacted character hyperbole (which he is really very good at). Instead, Nicholson in this film is simply genius. He walks with purpose, slowly and with a gait. He eats with a purpose, slowly and with a design of his entire personality in each bite of his sandwich. Nicholson as Schmidt, in the everyday act of ordering something from Dairy Queen, resonates with us something so deep that we become lost in Schmidt’s adventures and lost in, more importantly, his life.
About Schmidt is one of the finest films I have ever seen about life, love, loss and the unceremonious way that all of those things seem to never coagulate as well as we assume they should. Nothing in Schmidt’s “controllable” existence has seemed to form right, as evidenced by the dark cloud over Nicholson’s head in the poster for the film. Yet, as the film draws to a close, we may well learn that life isn’t so much about control as it is about allowing yourself to lose it once in a while.
8.5/10
