About Schmidt: 2002, dir. Alexander Payne. Seen on DVD (Jan. 20).
I had not actually intended to watch About Schmidt. My boyfriend rented the DVD and I figured he’d watch it one night when I wasn’t around. I was around when he put it on, and I thought I would do some computer work or read in my room, but I ended up watching the movie anyway. If you think this means that About Schmidt is an absorbing and entertaining film that I would recommend … you’re wrong.
We ended up seeing About Schmidt a week or so after we saw Sideways, which was adapted and directed by the same filmmakers. The problems I encountered with Sideways were magnified in About Schmidt.
What most people know or remember about About Schmidt is that it has Jack Nicholson in it. I would not quite call it a Nicholson vehicle, though. His character is quite different from the stock Nicholson clown, and the role could have easily been played by another actor.
Anyway, Nicholson’s character, Warren Schmidt, retires from his insurance company after many years, and this throws him off-balance. His life has no focus. He takes out a lot of his crankiness about this on his wife … who dies. His daughter refuses to put up with him, and goes back to Colorado to plan her wedding.
(Problem #1: Would you really continue to have a wedding a few months after your mom dies? The characters act as though Schmidt is crazy for suggesting a postponement, and admittedly he is only doing it because he hates the groom-to-be, but it does seem to me to be in very poor taste to have a wedding during a time when you are still mourning someone’s loss.)
Schmidt putters around his empty house, slowly falling to pieces, his only solace being the letters he writes to a child he has “adopted” in an underdeveloped country. He pours his heart out to this child in a way he does not do with anyone else.
Finally, he is galvanized into taking his big new RV on a trip to visit his daughter. He ends up staying with the groom-to-be’s family, all of whom appall him, but when it’s time for him to speak at his daughter’s wedding he manages to make a kind, respectful, loving speech. Then he’s disgusted with himself for “giving in” about his daughter’s horrible husband, and he goes home to sulk and gripe and continue to be terrible … until he receives a lovely drawing from the adopted child. Enlightenment … truth … beauty … fade out.
All of the characters in About Schmidt are appalling, with the exception of Schmidt’s wife, and she dies early in the movie. (It was nice to see, although briefly, that for once a character played by Jack Nicholson is actually married to/involved with someone close to his age.) Kathy Bates, as the groom-to-be’s mom, is a good enough actress to add some sympathy and dignity to her character that I suspect was not in the script, but everyone else is downright unpleasant to watch. Dermot Mulroney, normally a rather attractive actor to watch, is stuck playing the white-trash boyfriend Randall, complete with mullet.
So at the same time, we are supposed to sympathize with Schmidt for having to deal with such a piece of trashy jerkitude, but Schmidt is such a jerk himself that you don’t like him either.
As I said with Sideways, writer-director Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor don’t seem to like or respect their characters very much. They treat every character with varying levels of contempt. Perhaps we are supposed to see through the horribleness of these people into the good selves within, but it’s very difficult to get past all their stereotypical ugliness. These people aren’t quirky, they’re stereotypes gone wrong. Why should we want to watch them? Why should we care?
I’m not sure why I didn’t grab my laptop and go into my bedroom to do some work about halfway through the movie, except that I kept hoping it would get better, that the characters would change and become likeable people, or maybe that they’d all strangle each other. Also, once I have started watching a movie, it is hard for me to break away unless it is truly terrible, and this movie wasn’t all that bad. The acting was good enough for me to keep watching despite the predictability of the storyline and the unsympathetic characters.
About Schmidt was an unenjoyable movie about unpleasant people. (And not even the fun kind of unpleasant.) While the acting was good, you could rent any number of entertaining movies that include these actors doing just as fine a job. I urge you to rent one of those movies instead. (Although now that I look at the credits for these actors, I realize I don’t much like any of their movies. Hmph.)
See, I thought Sideways was pretty good. I don’t always like those “gritty realism” movies, but I liked it, despite one of the most horrifying frontal male nudity scenes in cinematic history.
I even kind of liked the hapless main character, because although he was a failure he was trying to be decent and to grow a pair, and his totally fucked up aging frat boy friend was funny, in a sad sort of way, and even had a pathetic moment of epiphany about his fuckedupness after which he went right back to being fucked up, which is what people often do in real life. I viscerally enjoyed Sandra Oh whaling the tar out of him with her helmet, too — how often does a wronged female character get to give the asshole what he deserves?
But oh my god. I hated About Schmidt. First of all, I don’t like Nicholson and never have. It’s All About Him. And then the movie was so horrible and depressing, it made me want to shoot myself the day I retire.