About Schmidt

Don't be too sure. About Schmidt, directed by Alexander Payne and adapted by Payne and Jim Taylor from a novel by Louis Begley, takes as its subject matter an experience - retirement - that is not too familiar in the movies. Of course, we've had a lot of films in which a character looks back on his life and assesses its worth - Ingmar Bergman's Smultronstallet/Wild Strawberries (1957), for instance, and Woody Allen's indirect homage to it, Deconstructing Harry (1997). But Warren Schmidt's life has not been as eventful, or as acclaimed, as the lives of Bergman's and Allen's protagonists; Henry David Thoreau's observation that men 'lead lives of quiet desperation' could have been coined for Schmidt. And in many ways, the film does sidestep expectation: it's a road movie, but Schmidt's inner journey is quite small; he meets various characters along the way, such as the groom-to-be's mother Roberta (Kathy Bates) and a couple in a trailer park who cook him dinner before the meeting turns sour, but these are more distractions from his solitude than cures for it.

These aspects to the movie are very nice surprises - and yet the film doesn't go far enough. After Election (1999), which was wonderfully focused and acidic in its satire of high school politics, Payne's next film was always going to be highly anticipated. About Schmidt is funny and sad, but somehow not quite as satisfying as its predecessor. The screenplay is unflinching in its depiction of a man in his sixties realising that his life has possibly amounted to not very much. But as a director, Payne can't quite decide whether to go for laughs or whether we should feel the awful desolation of Schmidt's predicament. After Helen has died, for example, there is a comic image of Warren abandoned and unable to take care of himself: the house is full of dirty dishes and leftover food. And yet Warren is no cartoon figure of fun and abandonment - despite his depression, he does have the courage to take to the road, alone, in his Winnebago, to drive across country to his daughter's wedding. And the film gives us a much more affecting image of Warren missing his wife: he sits at her dresser and rubs her face cream into his own face - too much cream, in fact, but the smell and texture of it conjures up such a vivid impression of the wife that he has lost that tears spring to his eyes. Next to a touch as good as that, the dirty dishes overstate the case. About Schmidt is at its best in its most serious, powerful moments, but Payne is perhaps is afraid to be too bleak, which is a shame. The story is bleak, and there's no escaping it. Maybe it's enough that a package such as this is paying more than just lip-service to men of retirement age - at least Schmidt isn't running round with a gun in one hand and a girl a third of his age in the other.

As Schmidt, Nicholson is very accomplished and very tender - it's a performance poised between a character portrayal and a star turn. On the one hand, he is undoubtedly Warren Schmidt: the sense of loss, the comb-over, the sheer airlessness of a man who has spent so long in the same office. And yet, the eyebrows are Nicholson's, and at one point his drawl is reminiscent of Charley Partanna, the dopey hitman from Prizzi's Honor (1985). And, of course, we can't watch this part without admiring how Nicholson has always traded his stardom on his willingness to be unkempt, disheveled. Nicholson is a rarity among stars, possibly unique, in that he is kind of hyper-attractive: whether as Jake Gittes in Chinatown (1974), in which he is at his most handsome, or as paunchy, middle-aged and randy Garrett Breedlove in Terms of Endearment (1983), he retains that essence known simply as 'Jack'. About Schmidt could bring him a fourth Oscar (which would equal Katharine Hepburn's record), but awards are just the icing on the cake for a career and body of work such as his.

Reviewed by Edward Lamberti