Nostalgia
ain't what it
used to be...

by Les Phillips

About Schmidt opens with a sequence displaying downtown Omaha -- it is unmistakably downtown Omaha. The camera takes particular interest in the tallest building; at its crest is the legend WOODMEN, and we see it from several angles. Then we see Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson, cleaning out his office on retirement day. Schmidt is an actuary for Woodmen of the World Insurance. And he moves stiffly, like a tin woodman, almost. He doesn't show emotion, but his gait and expression betray an inner sadness.

I have disliked most of Jack Nicholson's performances over the last quarter century. Other people see talent and virtuosity; I see a narcissist who's phoning it in. He may not have played the actual Jack Nicholson in all of those films, but he's certainly playing "Jack Nicholson," the widely accepted, familiar, angry, wiseass, rebel persona. Most people seem to cherish that image; I've been sick of it since approximately Cuckoo's Nest. My favorite Nicholson performance up to now is in The King of Marvin Gardens, where he's a solitary, depressed introvert. In About Schmidt, he's really old, quiet, somewhat cultivated and thoughtful, and lonely. And he's a Midwesterner, through and through -- never quite rejecting easy small talk, with ambitions that start and end with business, the office, the neighborhood, the family. In fact, Nicholson is completely absorbing, imaginative, playing against the expected. It is truly a wonderful performance. (Kathy Bates is very good, too.)

About Schmidt captures empty bonhomie and regulated family hatred as well as any film ever has. But it sometimes seems too much of the Midwest as well as about the Midwest. There is some subtle detail in the film, but it's not too subtle; the homes we see seem to have some culture, but not too much; Schmidt's discontent seems generic rather than particular. The director is Alexander Payne (Election).

If Jack Nicholson wins a Best Actor Oscar for About Schmidt, he will tie Katharine Hepburn's record of Academy Awards for acting: four. Despite his achievement in About Schmidt, I'm unwilling to suffer a season of media comparison between Nicholson and Katharine Hepburn.

Samantha Morton plays the title role in Morvern Callar - an odd, depressive Scottish girl who works in a supermarket. Her somewhat mysterious boyfriend commits suicide -- she awakens to find his body in the bathroom -- but leaves her the ATM card and his finished novel. From there the film is about a withdrawn, perhaps frightened woman who takes sudden risks, has adventures, radically reinvents herself -- though she still seems withdrawn if not frightened.

Samantha Morton has won acclaim for two roles in which she was mute (Sweet and Lowdown) and nearly so (Minority Report), and she's very quiet here, too; she has very little dialogue for a character who's present in virtually every scene. The character and the film are quite deliberately underwritten. There is very little in Morvern Callar that is predictable, but this may be, partly, because the boyfriend is not the only mysterious element. There's a difference, perhaps a fine difference sometimes, between a script and acting that underplay, and script and acting that leave the audience practically nothing to go on. (The director is Ratcatcher's Lynne Ramsay.) I must confess that I saw something elegant in this movie, but I can't tell what that something was.

Benjamin Bratt plays the late Nuyorican playwright in Leon Ichaso's Piñero. Naturalistic, gritty, New York footage of a drug-dependent, sexually conflicted, quasicriminal writer of talent. A straight approach would have given us the rise and fall of Miguel Piñero, tempted by fame, ruined by success, spit out of the celebrity machine after his fifteen minutes are up, left to grovel on the street. Instead the film scrambles chronology and resists narrative and moral clarity (which is fine by me, though the audience has a lot more work to do). I don't think Ichaso could decide whether to portray Piñero as a truly superior artist to whom attention, attention must be paid, or as a promising mess who fucked up. (Piñero's best play, Short Eyes, isn't better than a promising mess, in my opinion.)

Mandy Patinkin plays Joe Papp!! It saddens me to remember the New York theatrical scene of the seventies, when there were so many small theatrical companies and workshops which discovered and developed talented writers and directors and actors, including so many talented people of color -- mostly gone now, and Joe Papp with them, God bless...

Far From Heaven is a perfect fifties movie. The central anomaly in that statement -- that fifties movies do not show respectable husbands making out with other men in their corporate offices, and tend not to recommend interracial romance -- simply works itself into the texture of the film. Most writers have compared Far From Heaven to Douglas Sirk's work, and the director, Todd Haynes, has not discouraged that comparison. But Sirk's more brutal, campy forms of expressionism are not represented here. It's hard to imagine a more thoroughly realistic portrayal of fifties attitude, style, iconography, cheer, and doom in a film. The beautiful suburban landscapes that Haynes accentuates are not really camp -- the suburbs really are that beautiful, even if the lives there are not. The dialogue sounds stilted and homely now, but it's closer to the way real people spoke then (especially when they had to talk about politics and issues) than fifties movie dialogue ever was.

And we can make better fifties films than fifties directors ever could, if we're smart about it, because we've got better cinematography, better production values generally, and better actors. Julianne Moore is exactly right as Kathy Whitaker, perfect Junior League bourgeois housewife and licensed matron. She can show her inner world changing, even as her outer optimism and cheer stays painted on. I think that's a fine accomplishment. But for me the brave, edgy, heartbreaking performance comes from Dennis Quaid as Frank, the husband whose life unravels when Kathy catches him with another man. He's tremendously good. I haven't seen Quaid in a film since his glamour-puss period. He's willing to look older here, a whole lot older; in his most hopeless moments, he reminds you of Montgomery Clift after the car accident.

Half a dozen actresses comprise a sort of Amalgamated Society Housewives of Hartford, and they're all very good. I know from upper middle class WASP ladies in Hartford, though my adolescence there was fifteen years later than the time of this film. Haynes gets the milieu perfectly. But his political touch is sometimes heavyhanded. Was this inevitable given the style he'd adopted? I don't think so; Douglas Sirk would have signaled sexual upheaval with a huge thunderstorm, winds that blew into a room and threw all the curtains and sheets into a frenzy, but Haynes avoids that vulgarity (not that there's anything wrong with Douglas Sirk being vulgar). Setting the racial subplot at a time of integration talk is one thing; setting it in the very month of Little Rock is another. Kathy and her gardener going to an eating place to talk is one thing; being asked to leave a lunch counter is another. (Does Haynes really know whether lunch counters in Hartford were segregated in 1957? I'll bet they weren't.)

The gardener, Mr. Deagan, is played by a perfectly competent actor (Dennis Haysbert), but the performance is really Sidney Poitier's. Mr. Deagan is a perfect gentleman, educated, kind, caring, a wonderful father, courageous enough to be the only black person attending an abstract art exhibition, and learned enough to lecture Kathy on aspects of Joan Miro. This is a bit much, so much a bit much that I wondered if Haynes was just dissing the whole Poitier thang. (But that would undermine one of the true, immensely moving relationships in the film, so why would he do that? Is the dude moving three levels of deconstruction beyond me? I really hope not.)

There's more -- witty visual touches, like the corporate office entrance that resembles the facade of the television sets sold by the corporation (but look fast, or you'll miss it). The score is by Elmer Bernstein, who was writing lots of film scores in the fifties and sixties. And it's the best possible fifties film score, which means it has just the right amount of bombast, works in classic musical cues for prefab emotions and situations, and then develops real emotional depth within its own idiom. (Some nice jazz music for the gay bar scene.) The Whitakers' two children are more insistent, less marginal than they usually are in this sort of family drama. I think Haynes wants to remind us that they're getting screwed much worse than either of their parents, who are far too engrossed with their own psychodramas to really tend to the kids. They'll both hit college at approximately 1967-1969, and they're going to want a whole lot of attention then, and they'll almost certainly find ways to get it.

©2002 Les Phillips
CineScene