ABOUT SCHMIDT (2002)  ***1/2

Reviewed 9/25/02

While Jack Nicholson’s celebrated peers like Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman have cashed in on their fame by making movies Sylvester Stallone might aspire to and Harrison Ford devotes himself solely to movies for reasons of commerce rather than art, Nicholson has found good, ambitious roles in such movies as THE PLEDGE and ABOUT SCHMIDT.   My advice to actors: seek out good directors.   Nicholson has done that here with Alexander Payne, who has collaborated with writer Jim Taylor on two previous movies, ELECTION and CITIZEN RUTH, both remarkable jabs at American fixations, attitudes toward ambition and the battle over abortion, respectively.

In ABOUT SCHMIDT, 66-year old Warren Schmidt (Nicholson) has just retired from a long career as an actuary at the Woodmen insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska.  At his retirement party, one of Warren’s oldest friends, Ray (Len Cariou), tells him when a man looks back on his life, money and pensions are not what gives him true wealth, but rather that he has mattered in the lives of others.  In that sense, Ray tells Warren, he is a rich man.  The look on Warren’s face says he is anything but.  Warren lives a life of innocent but not quite innocuous self-deception.  He cannot stand his wife Helen (June Squibb) who takes care of his every need, but when she suddenly dies from a brain aneurysm, he realizes how much she meant to him.  He describes his daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) as working in a high-powered computer firm, but she actually works in the mailroom of a lo-tech shop.

Looking for a way to make his life meaningful, Warren decides to sponsor an African orphan named Ndugu through a non-profit called Childreach (a real organization), and Warren begins writing letters to Ndugu that take the form of voice-overs in the film.  These letters allow Warren an outlet for his frustrations, give him a priest to hear his confessions, and provide the audience with a good amount of the movie’s humor.  Doing some soul-searching, Warren sets out in a gigantic Winnebago to revisit places from his past and ultimately ends up in Denver for his daughter’s wedding, one he is against as Warren believes her fiancé Randall (Dermt Mulroney) is not good enough for Jeannie.  Randall is a lowbrow waterbed salesman who has never heard of a get-rich scheme he didn’t like.  Warren discovers that Randall’s family, divorced parents (Kathy Bates and Howard Hesseman) and a drooling brother (Mark Venhuizen), may be even less appealing as in-laws.

Here Payne tackles nothing less than the meaning of a man’s life, but in the process, he also digs into the superficiality of American culture – from fast food to radio talk shows to historic monuments.   By shifting the context into that of what is really meaningful, the gaudy commercialism of everyday life suddenly looks like the artificial pandering it is.  If all this sounds too somber, ABOUT SCHMIDT also happens to be one of the funniest movies of the year.   Payne does get too broad and obvious at times with jokes about waterbeds and percodan.  Also, Randall, who could be the cousin of the redneck in GHOST WORLD, is too easy a target, but for the most part, ABOUT SCHMIDT’s comedy remains satisfyingly satirical and poignant.  Nicholson, who completely resists going over-the-top, and Davis, who always feels invested in her roles, fare best as the two least caricatured characters.  The ending suffers a little from a contrivance that is just a little too pat, but one cannot help thinking that its moment of uplift is but a passing one.