For more than three decades, Jack Nicholson has given voice to our collective rage with characters who rail against the petty rules and bureaucratic hassles of modern life. He’s the cinema’s most enduring misanthrope.
In writer-director Alexander Payne, whose “About Schmidt” has earned Nicholson some of the best reviews of his career, the actor is finally matched with a filmmaker who explores the subject of human rage with equal fascination.
But there’s a curious conflict: While Nicholson’s post-“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” performances brim with sneering acidity, Payne’s characters are more muted in their frustration. They’re not rebels but weaklings who follow life’s rules and end up with nothing to show for it. Such was the case with Matthew Broderick’s character in “Election,” for which Payne was nominated for a screenwriting Oscar, and again it is the case with Warren Schmidt.
As the film begins, Schmidt has retired from a lifetime’s work in “the insurance game,” as he calls it. Having indulged for years the notion that his professional purgatory reflects a heroic devotion to his family, Schmidt is a little startled to discover the extent of his irrelevance after he retires.
His domestic life is a testament to boredom and his boasted professional expertise, it turns out, was but an illusion. In an unsettling scene, Schmidt shows up at the insurance company to lend a few pointers to his young replacement, only to discover that the new guy has already learned everything it took Schmidt 40 years to master.
Still, he tries to maintain his stoic composure. We get a glimpse of the character’s deeply-buried anger only after he becomes a sponsor to one of those third-world children you see on television. Despite the obvious fact that the boy cannot read, Schmidt uses their “correspondence” to vent, complaining about everything from his wife’s body odor to his daughter’s fiancé, a no-account waterbed salesman with a mullet from hell.
His letters are humorous in a pitch-black way. Indeed, the entire film — the last half of which consists mostly of Schmidt killing time in a Winnebago in the days leading up to his daughter’s wedding — is a tart but ultimately forgiving rebuke to his emotionally-constipated, middle-American mentality.
Schmidt’s tragedy is that of a man who has spent his entire life afraid of living. The film’s most poignant moments come as the character tries to take baby steps toward a more spontaneous existence; its wisest moments, however, show a man slowly coming to terms with the idea that it may be too late for change.
Instructively, when Schmidt finally gets the chance to lay into his new son-in-law during a wedding toast, he thinks better of it, offers the newlyweds some pat words of encouragement and takes his seat. Given the chance to let Nicholson rip into the lad, many directors would have succumbed to the temptation — but not Payne. He knows the tone he wants to set and, besides, we’ve seen that act before.
A lot of people forget that Nicholson’s best work came prior to his scorching fame, in films like “Five Easy Pieces” and “The King of Marvin Gardens,” quieter pictures that showcased the actor in deeper roles. As the scripts got weaker, however, Nicholson started chewing scenery — an understandable, if regrettable, career choice.
With “About Schmidt,” Payne has provided Nicholson with another chance to stretch as an artist and, in return, the actor turns in a sad, touching, immortal performance.
