About Schmidt By Peter Tonguette Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005.  His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

Alexander Payne's previous two films, Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999), were vividly drawn, incisive satires, examining, respectively, the national abortion debate and American political competition and disenfranchisement. His latest film, About Schmidt, finds him and his usual co-writer, Jim Taylor, applying the same satirical perspective (and, once again, setting a film in Payne's native Omaha) to the inherently more somber and quiet domain of Louis Begley's novel of the same name. The results are, unsurprisingly but disappointingly, uneven. It's a picture of maddeningly fluctuating rhythms, anchored principally by a wonderful lead performance by Jack Nicholson. Since Nicholson's performance is being treated as his best in some time by the mainstream critical community, I hope that I don't sound too contrarian when I say that his work here is on a par with, though not necessarily superior to, recent performances in James L. Brooks' As Good As It Gets (1997), Bob Rafelson's Blood and Wine (1997), and, in particular, Sean Penn's underrated The Pledge (2000).

Here, Nicholson is cast as insurance actuary Warren Schmidt. As the film opens, Schmidt is seen sitting in his cleaned out office on the day of his retirement. Though it's unclear if Warren was forced out of his job or chose to retire himself, it's quickly established that he clearly is not made out for the new life which awaits him. He sits through the obligatory toasts at his retirement dinner that evening--stepping out incognito halfway through for a vodka in one of the film's rawest and most wrenching moments--and anxiously returns to work the next day to see, pitifully, if his young successor could use any help his first few days on the job. Warren's
assistance, of course, is not required nor wanted and, as he exits the building, he finds, to his shock, that all of his files have been unceremoniously trashed--as much as he'd like to believe otherwise, Warren is a disposable entity in this glistening corporate age.

And this is About Schmidt's real subject: Warren's progressively more pathetic attempts to reclaim his role as a needed presence in life after the loss of identity caused by the demise of his career. Early in the film, Warren impulsively decides to join a "Feed the Children" type program he sees advertised on TV and sponsors a starving child in Africa with a check of $22
a month: this is this rather distant and cold man's way of remedying the newly minted impotence of his new life. Later in the film, he desperately tries to convince his daughter, a high tech professional living in Denver (Hope Davis), not to marry her fiance, Randall (Dermont Mulroney), the waterbed salesman she's fallen for and who Warren despises. This dispute forms the film's central dramatic conflict. When she rejects his advice, Warren's growing belief in his uselessness in this world is, to him, confirmed. But that "advice" seems at best unfounded--Randall is perhaps the most decent person in the film--and, at worst, an outgrowth of an extremely limited and elitist class prejudice on Warren's part.

And it is here that my problems with About Schmidt begin to assert themselves most strongly. I am afraid that it seems Payne and Taylor have too uncritically adopted Warren's view of people like Randall and the many, frequently "middle class" supporting characters he encounters and berates in the film. It's almost as though that in trying to mold this material to their usual (comedic, mocking) style, they've--intentionally or not--set up their hapless characters as targets, via Warren, of frequently cruel and extremely class conscious humor. But the difference between this film and Citizen Ruth or Election is that the lead character seems above the fray, not subject--or certainly much less subject--to the film's judgments.

The fault doesn't lie with Nicholson's performance--he never falters in his portrayal of this man and always seems true--or, to state the obvious, with setting up a flawed character as an object of audience sympathy. The fault instead lies in the filmmaking which makes it too easy to leave that sympathy unexamined and leave it as the final word. This is why the essentially comedic approach the filmmakers have taken in About Schmidt is problematic--the easy laughs, from which Warren is usually spared, encourage an unchallenged complicity with Warren's life view. When Warren is seen rolling his eyes and making faces in reaction to his
daughter's supremely "middle class" wedding, or, infamously, when Warren does the same as Randall's assertive, freethinking mother (Kathy Bates) disrobes and joins him in a hot tub, the audience is encouraged to laugh. But it's in a spirit of agreement with Warren's mocking of a socioeconomic group he views as below him instead of at his unfounded self-righteousness and pomposity. A better (and funnier) film would have more democratically dispersed the laughs, making Warren the target of them as much as the people Warren snidely turns up his nose to. Perhaps Elaine May--who so deftly undermined audience sympathy with a morally questionable lead protagonist in her 1972 masterpiece The Heartbreak Kid--could have done the job. That Bates, for one, manages to inject a more than fair about of basic humanity into her role is rather astonishing given what she has to work with.

About Schmidt attains real, unforced power in its quieter and more reflective moments. Perhaps that's why the film's pictorially resplendent middle section--Warren traveling to Denver in his Winnebago--was the most satisfying for me. Without stereotypes to act off of and laugh at, Payne and Taylor allow the audience to see Warren as the desperate and sad man that he is. Not coincidentally, it is in these all too rare moments that the man's humanity comes through and in which I recall most strongly my sympathy for him.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002