Film review: Nebraska (Director: Alexander Payne)
By Sascha Krieger
Sometimes, one learns about a film’s key characteristic in its first frame: a dreary highway somewhere in the American wilderness, somewhere in the outskirts of a rather non-descript town. An old man walks on it, fragile, yet doggedly ploughing on. Yes, Nebraska, the new film by Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) is a road movie. And yes, as is often the case with Payne, it is a family story. a father and son who never had much to say to each other, the younger (Will Forte) an average man with an average job and a girlfriend who just walked out on him, the elder a life-long drinker, hard, bitter, unapproachable. Of course, they will find some closeness on their journey which is a strange journey indeed: the father has received a letter proclaiming he won a million dollars, Everyone else recognizes it for what it is: a trick to sell magazine description but the father, somewhere between stubbornness and beginning dementia, refuses to accept it. Try as they may but again and again, Woody walks out to go the 750 miles to Nebraska to pick up his prize. In the end, son David relents and drives him. They stop by in his father’s home town where an impromptu family reunion is staged, the assumed riches generate various desires and old conflicts alight again among the town’s people before they continue on their journey, which unexpectedly ends in a little, humorous triumph.
The film turns out to be a bit of a mixed bag. It is strongest when it focuses on the family and on Woody. Bruce Dern is the real story – and the most accomplished story teller – of Nebraska. Payne gives him plenty of close-ups, and the 77-year-old pays back with interest. The black and white which Payne has chosen for his film helps to give Dern’s face an out of time quality, like someone from old days long gone by, an wanderer from a world we hardly remember. How he moves from the expressionless appearance of a man who has plainly lost it, to subtle glimpses of some sort of life left in him, how his eyes convey unexpressed love, lingering regret, unsatisfied longing while the rest of his face remains immobile and seemingly dead is as breathtaking as it is done with the finest of brushes. These people, living isn’t the desolate wastelands of Montana or Nebraska do not talk much, they are hardened by time of life, but there is still a residue of love – for each other, for life. There is hardly any discernible change in the (non-)relationship of Woody and David by the film’s end, yet they have come many, many miles, are closer than they have ever been. and suddenly this highly dysfunctional group – the stubborn stone-like Woody, the melancholic David, the bitter and constantly complaining mother June Squibb) and the successful older brother (Bob Odenkirk), who is as vain as he is pragmatic, merge into a family unit that in the end, is all they have and they know it.
The dry, matter-of fact observational style Payne is such a master of, highlighted by those long, quiet, slow frames, with the camera repeatedly moving into the distance only to come unbearable close the next moment, is here intensified by the pale, relentless black and white, depicting a world more dead that alive, a world of aging populations and deserted houses, harvested farms and empty roads, run-down taverns and people who have nothing left to say. Payne’s look is one of clinical precision, he doesn’t spare us any of its ugliness and yet he finds love where it could not e expected. What has been gained on this trip is fragile, it might not even have much substance but we must believe in it because it is all that there is.
Nebraska could have been a memorable, touching, even cautiously funny film if it did not have that other level: it also tries to be a satire of greed, of narrow-mindedness, of all the vices even well-meaning people can fall victim to. The problem is that Payne turns most of his minor characters into one-dimensional caricatures, ridiculous idiots, flat characters with no redeeming features. Stacy Keach, for example, stars as Ed, former collaborator and friend of Woody’s and is made to depict him as a rather ridiculous villain that is oddly out of place here. The portrayal of the extended family as slow, silent dunces is rather simplistic, too, and contrasts strangely with the subtle depiction of the protagonists. All in all, the Nebraskan town they are stuck in for two days is full of clichéd country folk with only one positive standout who in her ever-smiling goodness is even more unbearable than those lusting after a share of the assumed riches. The effect is that the black and white takes over the story and characterization for much too long, creating an odd coldness that keeps distancing us from what we see. Nebraska is two films in one which do not fit together with one of which even being a rather bad one. At the end, one wishes Alexander Payne had trusted his main characters – and his actors – a little more. They could have carried the film and there is some reason to believe they should have.
Stage and Screen 