Alexander Payne (2013)
Woody Grant is determined to get from his home in Billings, Montana to Lincoln, the state capital of Nebraska, to collect the $1m that he’s been told his won. The good news arrived in a form letter. His exasperated wife Kate and sons Ross and David keep telling Woody the letter’s bogus but the old man is hellbent on claiming his prize. Woody, who used to be an odd job man and drove a truck, has now lost his driving licence – presumably because he was drunk in charge of the vehicle. (He’s long been a heavy drinker.) More than once, he starts the eight-hundred-mile journey on foot without getting more than a few hundred yards. Eventually, the younger son David decides to indulge Woody: the trip will be a change of scenery and an opportunity for Woody to go back to his roots (he was raised on a farm outside Hawthorne, a small Nebraskan town). It will also be a chance for David to try and get to know the taciturn, cantankerous father he’s never been close to.
I wasn’t convinced that Woody, ornery but seemingly resigned to a life that’s been unsatisfying, would feel compelled to pursue his million dollars but there’s no movie if he isn’t. And it’s a shrewd move on the part of Alexander Payne and his scenarist Bob Nelson to give Woody both a personality and hints of a medical condition – incipient dementia or the effects of decades of alcoholism or both – that mean he has probably limited powers of thought and certainly little to say: his idée fixe can thus be kept in the dark. His wife and sons, as sceptics about the cash prize, are in a small minority. In Hawthorne, Woody’s extended family and old acquaintances are all too willing to believe that he’s struck lucky. Not only that, they like their chances of touching him for money – for the settlement of a claimed unpaid debt, in the case of his ex-business partner and nemesis Ed Pegram. (For Woody’s part, it still rankles with him that Ed, many years ago, purloined the air compressor that belonged to him.) These interested parties aren’t materially well off and don’t have any prospects of changing their life. The strong implication is that if you’re desperate enough you’ll believe anything; and that, for the people of Hawthorne, Nebraska, being envious and mercenary is doing what comes naturally.
A recent New Yorker profile of Alexander Payne by Margaret Talbot quoted Jim Taylor, who co-wrote with Payne the screenplays for all the latter’s movies before The Descendants, as follows:
‘We’re interested in people who are both ridiculous and noble in their dedication to what they’re after. We sometimes get ‘Oh, you’re making fun of people’. Well, we try to remember how ridiculous we ourselves are. And it’s not hard.’
Nebraska is unique among Payne’s features in that he doesn’t have a screenplay credit but it fits neatly into his oeuvre (and it’s better than the inexplicably overrated The Descendants). He may well see his films in a similar light to Taylor but it’s harder for anyone else to interpret them that way: watching the obese, often ugly, rarely intelligent blue-collar types in evidence in Nebraska, you’re unlikely to think they’re a self-portrait of clever, good-looking, wealthy, Oscar-winning Alexander Payne. His sympathy for people in this story is manifested only in moments of sentimentality and loss of nerve – that is, when he turns back at the last minute from the implications of his pervasive misanthropy. Kate scolds Woody in everything she says – right up to her last line: as he lies in hospital, she grumbles that he’ll be the death of her but she then kisses his forehead before she departs the scene. More largely, Payne has to make the trip ultimately worthwhile in that it brings about a rapport between Woody and David. I found both the kiss and the new father-son bond a relief and I don’t see them as inherently unlikely. They come across as false, though, because they contradict what Payne suggests in the rest of the movie. They’re unpersuasive through being untrue not to life but to the scheme that the director has constructed.
Payne was born and raised in Omaha and is still much involved with it: you’re meant to take it as read that he fully understands the places and people of Nebraska. In this movie his attitude to the non-human features of the state is more benign than his treatment of its inhabitants. The wide-screen black-and-white images of fields and skies, farm machinery, small town streets and mostly deserted roads, shot by Phedon Papamichael, are bleakly beautiful – although they are photographs rather than moving pictures. Some of the shots of people too – like Woody and the other men in the family arranged in chairs to watch a football game on television as wives prepare lunch – suggest the work of an artful photographer rather than a movie-maker. Margaret Talbot’s piece gave several examples of Payne’s care in choosing or designing just the right location and you can see this – inside and outside the bars and outhouses, in the shop fronts, at a cemetery. But the spatial contrast between the draughty, largely empty locale and the constricted, humdrum lives lived within it is obvious and, as far as the smaller roles are concerned, you knew what you were in for from the off-putting trailer for Nebraska. The only engaging minor character is an elderly woman called Peg, who still runs the local paper in Hawthorne. She was Woody’s girlfriend half a century ago, until Kate appeared on the scene. Angela McEwan, who plays Peg (who doesn’t feature in the trailer), is an experienced actress but Payne has cast non-actors too. As you can soon tell from their clumsy line readings, he’s cast them solely for their eccentric verging on grotesque appearance. There’s virtually nothing to suggest anything attractive in the existence of these people: the closest they come to community spirit is late on, in a sequence in a bar, as they join in laughing as Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), who’s got hold of the $1m letter, reads it out with derisive glee. Payne relies for emotional variety on Mark Orton’s wryly effective, sometimes charming strings music.
The performances of Bruce Dern (Woody), Will Forte (David) and June Squibb (Kate) amount to more than you might fear from the trailer and although the role of the elder son Ross (he has hopes of a career as a late-blooming local TV anchorman) is thin, Bob Odenkirk plays him nicely. Eighty-four year old June Squibb is the bridge between the characterisation of the Hawthorne folks and the (somewhat) more nuanced treatment of the core of the Grant family. Squibb (who made a briefer appearance as the wife who died and set off the main narrative in Payne’s About Schmidt) speaks her lines deliberately but you gradually discern more shading in her set vocal rhythms and facial expressions. I still felt a resistance to the character of Kate, though, which depends heavily on the assumed comedy of an old woman talking dirty and embarrassing her modest son. As for that kiss in the hospital: I can’t help finding it depressing to see and hear an elderly couple who normally moan at and about each other showing, in a crisis (but only in a crisis), that they really care. All the evidence suggests that the marriage of Woody and Kate has been an unhappy one – I must have dozed off at the point at which her decision to join the men in Hawthorne, after berating them both as they set off on their trip, is explained. I never much liked Bruce Dern in his 1970s heyday and haven’t missed his absence in the many years since then. Although he showed a terrific, startling intensity as the basketball coach in Jack Nicholson’s Drive, He Said (1971), he was monotonously strident in films such as The Great Gatsby (1974), Family Plot (1976) and Coming Home (1978). But his rangy, gawky physique is remarkable and his bug-eyed stare makes sense in the role of Woody, whose enervated, closed-down quality also means that Dern’s aggression is rationed.
It’s Will Forte, however, who keeps you going through Nebraska. A Saturday Night Live stalwart, Forte, who’s in his mid-forties, hasn’t done much straight acting and what he does as David isn’t major but it’s emotionally expressive at the right level and the character is more likeable than everyone else in the film put together. Forte’s also a relief in this company simply by virtue of being reasonably good-looking. David – a nice, harassed, disappointed man – has just broken up with his girlfriend of two years. She’s the unglamorous lump you’d expect in the Montana as well as the Nebraska of Alexander Payne’s USA, although Missy Doty plays her one scene well. David has an unrewarding job as a salesman at a computer store – the only customers we see him with are, of course, physically unprepossessing and disagreeably curt. Not only does David not ‘know’ Woody; he seems to know very little about anyone else in his family. In the Hawthorne cemetery, Kate talks to her son about his grandparents as if they were distant ancestors. But you still want things to work out for David. After he and his father have made it to Lincoln and received the inevitable confirmation that Woody is not a millionaire, David trades his car in for a truck, buys the air compressor Woody’s missed for decades, and lets the old man drive the vehicle in triumph through the main street of Hawthorne until they’re on the road home to Montana, where David gets back in the driving seat. By the close of Nebraska, I felt I was on the same wavelength as the principals at least in terms of being grateful for small mercies. I wasn’t convinced by the upbeat ending but it was preferable to a downbeat one.
18 December 2013
