Running time: 124 minutes
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney, June Squibb, Kathy Bates, Howard Hesseman
Rating 8 out of 10
The opening scene depicts the forlorn figure of Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) watching the clock as the final seconds of his job as an insurance salesman tick down. At five o'clock he picks up his briefcase and heads off into the abyss of retirement. Deftly traversing the fine line between black comedy and tragedy, About Schmidt explores what it is to reach the end of your working life and to question your accomplishments. "What difference has my life made to anyone?" reflects Schmidt, "none that I can think of." It's a devastating realisation, but one that writer and director Alexander Payne handles with invention and tenderness, without resorting to bathos. He focuses the same offbeat vision on Louis Begley's novel as he applied so successfully to Election. And, with some vibrant performances from a wonderful cast (including the ever-brilliant and very naked Kathy Bates), he has produced one of the year's most effecting films.
A bravely vulnerable Nicholson foregoes his usual cool image, employing a comb-over and shuffling gate to convey the hapless Schmidt. At 66 years old, and having been married for 42 of them to the domineering Helen (June Squibb), Schmidt was having a hard time accepting his old age. Of his wife, he'd found himself asking, "Who is this old woman who lives in my house?" It was just one of the many questions he mulled over in the long empty days that retirement had brought.
As much out of boredom as good will, he responds to a letter from a childcare charity and becomes the foster father to a six-year old Tanzanian boy. Along with a donation, he is encouraged to send the boy some information about himself. For the normally taciturn Schmidt, the invitation opens the floodgates and he unburdens his thoughts in a series of revealing letters about his life, his daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis), her deadbeat fiancé (Dermot Mulroney) and his wife. "I hate the way she sits. I hate the way she smells." When she suddenly dies though, his world crumbles. Realising "Life is short, " he sets out on a cross-country trip in his motorhome to attend his daughter's wedding and revisit the huge chunks of his past that had gone missing.
Nicholson gives a moving portrayal of the wretched Schmidt whose youthful expectations had long since turned into abject resignation. To find the humour and heart in such a distraught figure is what makes About Schmidt so uplifting and resonant.
