It's easy to presume About Schmidt isn't much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn't much of anything. He's portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland of retirement, can't possibly be the same man who was once George Hanson, Jake Gittes, Randle Patrick McMurphy, Jimmy Hoffa, the Joker; he's too shrunken, too insignificant to himself and to everyone else, even to his own family. "I can't believe it's really me," he shruggingly admits, poring over a face lined with wrinkles, a head barely obscured by an absurd comb-over, ears overflowing with wild hairs, ankles wrapped in varicose veins. Warren says he used to believe "destiny tapped me to be a great man," but now, in his mid-60s, he's merely a lonely man, an invisible man -- a nowhere man.
Forget it, Warren, it's Omaha
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Throughout the film, directed and co-written by Alexander Payne and adapted (very, very loosely) from a 1996 novel by Louis Begley, Warren will learn almost nothing, become nothing special. He will lose his wife, Helen (Jane Squibb), to a sudden heart attack, but that's just as well; he can no longer stand the sight of the "old woman" who lives in his house, who makes him piss sitting down. (Given that Nicholson schtups women half his age, if that, Squibb looks more like his mother.) He will lose his whining, wan daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis), to a mulleted waterbed-selling putz with go-nowhere pyramid-scheme plans (Dermot Mulroney). He will lose his job, his best friend (after discovering that decades earlier, said friend had a brief affair with Helen), his dignity, his temper, perhaps even his mind. And when all is said and done, he will still have nothing -- only his empty home, his empty life, and a 6-year-old African orphan named Ndugu to whom Warren sends $22 a month and bitter, heartbreaking letters explaining to him (and us) just how and why he's such a failure.
What makes About Schmidt so extraordinary is how ordinary its tale is; it's a gray picture about gray people looking for some kind of meaning in their gray lives. They will take pleasure from the smallest of victories and find solace in the unlikeliest of places (except for Kathy Bates' hot tub), and in the end, they will find no meaning or morals, only that the struggle to devote their lives to something meaningful is pretty much all ya got. Payne, director of Citizen Ruth and Election, makes Hollywood movies that play more like your own home movies: Somewhere in each of his pictures, you will recognize someone you know, someone who looks or acts or wants or aches just like you.
Nicholson barely moves here, barely even seems to breathe or blink or bend. He climbs out of bed like his body turned into a mattress overnight, and what some might mistake for a man moving with calm dignity is no more than someone wrought stiff from years of sitting in a chair and waiting for the clock to strike 5. That's where we see Warren during the first moments of the film: The camera hovers over downtown Omaha (Payne's hometown, and the setting of all his films) and deposits us in Warren's office, which is packed and awaiting the next sucker.
Those who would insist Payne paints patronizing portraits of his characters miss the point; Payne loves Warren with the same affection he bestowed upon Laura Dern in Citizen Ruth and Matthew Broderick in Election. They aren't clowns or fools or losers even, merely people who've realized too late that their lives are no more significant than grains of sand in the Sahara. Warren's is precisely the mundane, exasperating, unrewarding life lived by people who don't review movies for a living and don't find Deep Meaning in hobbits and wizards. He's the Thoreau poster boy, one of the masses of men leading a life of quiet desperation. For all his stillness, there exists within him a torrent of furious rage, which he unleashes in his first letter to Ndugu. It's a hysterical moment but also one of overwhelming sadness; you crack a broad smile, even as your heart breaks for this guy. There is no razzle or dazzle in Payne's films: The laughs aren't broad, the tears aren't big, the people aren't special. That's what makes them so special after all.
