Nebraska

Synopsis: Septuagenarian Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) makes the trip from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska with his adult son David (Will Forte) in order to claim a million-dollar prize.  

Alexander Payne’s area of special interest is the male identity and in particular the quiet desperation of ordinary Joes who struggle to come to terms with its unforgiving demands.  Although his previous film, The Descendants was a little too glib in this respect, Sideways and About Schmidt are both well-crafted portraits of men who in their own as well as the eyes of the world, fail to measure up to expectations. Woody Grant is very much of the same stripe. A lifelong alcoholic, a hen-pecked husband and a neglectful father, he fixates on a cheap marketing ploy offering him instant wealth as if it were his salvation.  He is derided by his wife (June Squibb) and eldest son (Bob Odenkirk) but his youngest son, David, understands what he is about. Working in a hi-fi and electronics goods store, recently walked out on by his plain girlfriend, he shares the same debilitating melancholy as his father. And so the two men end up on the road together. 

Like Sideways and About Schmidt, Nebraska is a road trip movie. I’m not sure why it is black and white as it is set in the present and indeed looks like a colour film rendered into shades of grey but the monotone palette does help with the sense of loss that pervades the story, the main portion of which occurs in a stopover town where Woody grew up, had a business, married and had his two children.  Much like the Coen brothers, Payne has a flair for capturing the idioms of regional America and there is much fun had here with the day-to-day ordinariness  of this farming region, now a virtual wasteland inhabited by old timers and a few younger deadbeats too useless or apathetic to live anywhere else.

In the lead the Oscar-nominated Bruce Dern does a fine job as the stubborn and generally unlikeable old codger but Will Forte, in a far less attention-grabbing role, is also very effective as his almost improbably supportive son.

At times the film tries a little too hard for comedy, particularly with the character of Woody's wife.  If anything it needed to be even more low-key in writing than it is for, unlike Payne’s previous films, there is a much stronger sense of pathos at work here. Depending on your inclinations this will be a commendable step away from the mainstream  tendencies of The Descendants. Although not in the league of Peter Bogdanovich’s masterpiece of broken dreams The Last Picture Show, Nebraska is a winsomely understated tale from the dead centre of America.

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