After the war in Iraq, SARS and About Schmidt, you could be forgiven for wanting to kill yourself. Get it over and done with before the pestilence, guns and depression get you. About Schmidt does not exactly contain textbook elements of light entertainment. Old man retires from insurance job. Old man hates wife. Wife dies. And that’s just the first 20 minutes.
The film meticulously sets up its misery. Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) is retiring from life as an actuary calculating risk and begins to wonder where he went wrong, what equation left his life failing to equate. His daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) is about to marry an idiot. He hates the way his wife Helen (June Squibb) sits down; he hates the way she smells and hates the way she makes him sit down on the toilet to piss.
But Schmidt’s wife dies and his once immaculate house is abruptly full of debris exploded from a life of restraint. There is crap everywhere as he wanders around eating taco shells and pissing all over the bathroom. Nicholson’s physical incarnation of Schmidt is exceptional. His comb-over hair waives listlessly on top of his head like a sail, stubble roams free on his old face and he starts looking like one of those guys who swears at traffic. Then Schmidt decides to leave town and suddenly we get a road trip following a truckin’ retiree in a 35 foot Winnebago Adventurer (big caravan). It’s the sort of humour that makes you wince through your smile.
About Schmidt was directed and co-written by Alexander Payne. The screenplay was the cinematic fruit of yet another collaboration with co-writer Jim Taylor and adapted from a novel by Louis Begley. Taylor has co-written all three feature films directed by Payne and both the cinematic technique and milieu of About Schmidt are familiar; voiceover is used to extract the internal conflict of ordinary people, sorry, ordinary Americans. When referring to the use of voiceover in Payne’s previous film Election the director advised Scenario Magazine that ‘you can get more information in, and you can have that wonderful discrepancy and irony between what people say and what they do. I actually think that voiceover is the single greatest contribution of talking cinema, of talking pictures. More so than dialogue even’. So you could say he’s a fan of the voiceover.
Yet the first half of the film looks and feels quiet and frozen, even with the voiceover. The irritation and contempt balled up in Schmidt is communicated in long existential letters to his illiterate foster child "Ndugu" in Tanzania. These comically depressing letters are spoken as the camera barely moves to capture truck stops, stony skies, dirt roads, power lines and snowy suburban streets and fields. But it’s slow and depressing and doesn’t feel like the stuff of the greatest cinema of all time.
By the time a sentimental Schmidt sits on top of his caravan and attempts to communicate with his dead wife you wish he’d drive his caravan off a cliff. In fact when Roberta Hertzel (Kathy Bates) arrives you feel just about to keel over in mere sympathy. It’s a relief when the pale, watery landscapes and retiree chic of the Schmidts is displaced by the carnival of the Hertzel household – these guys are animals. Roberta with the entire swagger her name suggests, drinks and swears (‘drink your fucking milk and shut the fuck up’). She plies Schmidt with booze and sedatives and propositions him in the spa. The walls of the house are red. But as you watch the Hertzels eat dinner as food circles on the ‘lazy-susan’ you realise that these people sucking and chewing their food disgust Schmidt and offer no redemption from his loneliness.
You’ve got to respect Nicholson for taking a role like this. He is actually playing his age and he isn’t likeable, or handsome. Although Schmidt is similar to the grumpy old crank that Nicholson played in As Good As It Gets, he doesn’t pick up a skeletal young blonde like Helen Hunt. He is an old man married to a woman who looks old in what looks like an old person’s house. When you see a quality role for a 66-year-old man it reminds you Hollywood gives old men the world. Actors like Nicholson, Douglas and Connery are able, at the same time as playing quality flicks like About Schmidt, to also play roles in which they are able to procure young women.
About Schmidt is less than the sum of its parts. The painstakingly detailed sets, costumes and dialogue, a brilliant performance by Nicholson and numerous truly comic scenes are not enough. And ultimately it’s difficult to tell how Schmidt became so unhappy. Despite being a road movie, in many ways it starts at its destination – unhappiness. The film spends its time being desolate, saying in a million different ways that there is no hope and that everyone will be unhappy but fails to explore how or why this unhappiness occurs.