When first we meet 65-year-old Warren Schmidt, he is sitting silently in his office (that of an insurance firm) waiting for the clock to strike 5pm. It strikes, if “strike” is not too aggressive a word for this quiet, almost somnolent scene, and Schmidt leaves his office. He is now officially retired.Next, we see Schmidt at his farewell dinner, where his smug young successor pays him empty compliments and an older colleague tells him boozily that he can retire with pride: “You devoted your life to something meaningful.” The fulsome words jar with what we’ve seen of Schmidt so far; and they continue to jar as he enters post-retirement life.
For the rest of the movie, we, along with Schmidt, will be wondering how meaningful his life really was, and how meaningful it is now.He is facing a nagging wife in a run-down marriage and a beloved, soon-to-be-married daughter who does not need or want his fatherly concern. What, in fact, is Warren Schmidt for? I won’t say more, because each plot development is so finely calibrated that I was glad I hadn’t read any reviews before I saw About Schmidt. How the movie explores the issues faced by Schmidt is touching, scary, and also very funny.
Written and directed by Alexander Payne, a young American filmmaker who had something of a success a year or two ago with the quirky high school comedy-drama Election, About Schmidt has something of the tone of that earlier film. It is a strange mix of the downbeat, almost a version of suburban minimalism, and a kind of dark whimsy: there are moments of surprise, and moments of upliftment, but the whole thing sits at a slight angle to reality.
It’s hard to get something like this to work. Witness Thomas Dean Anderson’s charming, but ultimately unsatisfying Punch-Drunk Love. All imaginative narrative art, it could be argued, is a mixture of reality and fantasy; it’s the mix, and the relation between the two, that counts. Many filmmakers (and fiction-writers) make the mix easier to swallow by opting for an outward appearance of one or the other — down-home realism or full-on fantasy. When the two strains are mixed in a way more like a marbled cake, the effects are very interesting, but also unpredictable. With About Schmidt, Payne gets it right. Even what sentimentality there is feels balanced by irony.
It helps (a lot) that Warren Schmidt is played by Jack Nicholson. Here the man with the demented eyebrows damps it down, makes his character a slow, shuffling, bewildered man — a little man. He lacks even the broken-down grandeur of Nicholson’s last big lead role, the obsessive cop in Sean Penn’s The Pledge. Schmidt has had nothing in his life worth breaking down. The cast as a whole is excellent — Kathy Bates, in particular, and an almost unrecogniseable Dermot Mulroney, who keeps popping up in smallish roles (The Safety of Objects and Lovely and Amazing, for instance) and making something marvellous of them.
But it’s Nicholson’s movie. Instead of leering out of the screen at us, as he so often does, Nicholson seems to pull Schmidt’s face inward, scrunching it into itself. This is a man turning ever more into himself even as he tries to reach out into the world. As befits Payne’s carefully poised tone, Nicholson takes Schmidt right to the edge of caricature, without letting him tip over, and he makes him absurd while keeping him rather pathetically lovable. I think it’s time for Jack’s next Oscar.