Shooting Nebraska in black and white announces Alexander Payne’s intentions. A mistake: the movie requires the fullest digital color. But because like any good director he believes content shapes form he thinks this diary of a superfluous man named Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) requires grayness. Dull gray the shade of faded newspaper clippings used as bookmarks in Bibles. An alcoholic whose wife (June Squibb) resents him for letting relatives ride roughshod over him for decades, the ailing Woody misreads a sweepstakes letter and thinks he’s won a million bucks. Attempts to walk from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska end with son David (Will Forte) picking up from the side of the interstate. David, a salesman at an electronics store, has broken up with his girlfriend of two years. His brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk, reprising the unctuousness from his “Breaking Bad” role) stands to get promoted to anchor on local television. What Nebraska gets right is the greyness of familial relations, the ease with which habits calcify into law; no one likes each other much yet they can’t live far apart either. Persuading himself into thinking a trip to Lincoln will deepen his relations with Woody, David agrees to the drive if they also stay with one of Woody’s seven brothers in Hawthorne. And grayness fell over the town.
Sons may recognize in Woody the ghosts of fathers who spent too many years in losing battles with their own histories to care much about the business of childrearing, and Phedon Papamichael shoots those scenes of septuagenarians quietly dying in dust-covered sofas while watching ball games with the precision of a sniper. Presentation defines these characters; they’re not allowed to be anything other than what you see — to think that, as Harold Bloom said about Shakespeare’s fools, they can walk off screen and continue living. Two overweight and unemployed cousins of David’s chortle over how long it took David to reach Hawthorne. They repeat the joke. And again. The conceit of Bob Nelson’s script is to keep David from insisting hard enough to his envious relatives and hangers-on that Woody really hasn’t won a goddamn thing; he thinks the fiction is healthy. Some of those hangers-on include Woody’s former partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), who lent Woody money years ago and wants it back; and the editor of the town newspaper, played by Angela McEwan in the movie’s most delicate scene. The non-actors, cast as David and Ross’ aunts and uncles and townspeople, have excellent faces: men and women familiar from Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, who’ve smoked too much and endured harsh winters and eaten bad food and whose courtesy is tinged with violence.
You can search through seven years of reviews on this site and not find a single reference of the cliche “Anybody can play this part.” Well, here it is. Stacy Keach could have played Woody Grant (Keach, often a boring overactor, uses his thick body here to convey the correct repressed menace). Will Forte will play him in twenty years; maybe he’ll get Oscar notice too. I don’t think Bruce Dern is a good actor. He gave a fine performance as a blowhard in Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens but in the rest of the movies I’ve seen he stymied directors: was he going to play a hellion or an introvert? This confusion bolloxed his Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1974), his garrulous crook in Family Plot (1976), and his damaged vet in Coming Home (1978). In Nebraska he’s getting credit for withholding pleasure from the audience, and while I thank Payne and Nelson for keeping Woody as unyielding as his name suggests the movie is still infused with masculine sentimentality. This is another movie about tough dads and the sons trying to reach them. An act of courage would have been to pit Odenkirk and Dern against each other, like piranhas; Odenkirk’s Ross gives the impression he will do the minimum for these deadbeats.
Why is this kind of old age so often vindicated with Oscar nominations and critic prizes? Filmmakers prefer seniors who are wisecracking coots or catatonic shells like Dern and Emmanuelle Riva in Amour. Last year I mourned how Jean-Louis Trintignant’s sardonic portrayal of Riva’s husband got no attention. Of course not: he’s playing a man whose intelligence (and malevolence) are untouched by age; it’s harder to classify him. Despite its small pleasures (and, again, those amateur faces), Nebraska offers autumnal kitsch, choreographed by a director who should avoid the James Michener approach to movie titles if they’re going to despoil his talent if it hasn’t been despoiled already (Sideways and The Descendants played like Travel + Leisure cover stories on Napa Valley and Hawaii respectively). I suppose female directors and screenwriters stay away from this bullshit because for a woman in Hollywood old age starts at thirty-five.
Humanizing The Vacuum 