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OLD AGE AND LOSS IN FEATURE-LENGTH FILMS

Filmmaker and Executive DirectorTerra Nova Films, Inc.9848 S. Winchester Ave. Chicago, IL 60643 E-mail: jvb{at}terranova.org

About Schmidt. In theaters/2002/125 min. Video/DVD available June 2003. Based on the novel by Louis Begley. Screenplay by Louis Begley, Alexander Payne, and James Taylor III. Directed by Alexander Payne. Distributed by Entertainment Film Distributors.

Finally! A major motion picture that neither demeans nor sentimentalizes elderhood. About Schmidt is a film so rich in reality that you feel familiarly at home watching it. This is no over-the-top Hollywoodization-of-life film. About Schmidt is about a common man whose life at age 66 is going through the transitions that often bring out a renewed thirst for meaning in one's life. Retirement, the sudden death of his spouse, and the pending marriage of his only daughter to a man he thinks is "not up to snuff" are the events that jolt Schmidt (played by Jack Nicholson) into reflecting and asking, "What did I do in my life to make a difference?"

The opening scene of the film spatially hints at this question of life's meaning and also gives a snapshot of what kind of person Schmidt has been up until now. Surrounded by bare box-like walls and a few packed up file boxes, Schmidt sits immobile, staring at a clock on the wall while the hands slowly reach 5:00. At that cue, he rises, goes to the door, looks around at the room without much emotion, and retires out of his lifelong job as a life insurance actuary in Omaha, Nebraska. From here on, Jack Nicholson's expressive face becomes one of the keys to reading the movie. With uncanny talent, Nicholson portrays Schmidt's repression of emotion as he goes through the rough passages of retirement, loss, and regret. Through it all Schmidt's face often has a look of passive amiability, a demeanor which belies what is actually going on for him internally.

In order for us to know what is going on in Schmidt's inner world, the movie's creators deftly integrate into the film a unique device for us to hear some of Schmidt's true thoughts and feelings. Shortly after his retirement, Schmidt, while channel surfing, sees an infomercial for sponsoring an impoverished third-world child. He responds, and part of what he is asked to do is to write letters to his newly sponsored foster child. These letters are the way we come to know the real Schmidt and his inner feelings as he encounters life-changing events and transitions.

One of the delights of the film is that Schmidt's struggles are not presented and interpreted with pure pathos. Instead, the scripting and directing imbue the film with a genuine humor that allows us to laugh at the common foibles we recognize in Schmidt because we see them as well in ourselves and in those we are close to.

In the wake of his retirement and his wife's death, Schmidt is also confronted by the estranged nature of his relationship with his daughter. He loves his daughter. She has been one of the bright spots in his life, but he does not know how to truly communicate with her. Their relationship has a kind of guarded formality that, under the stress of emotional events, erupts into arguments and hostility on the part of the daughter. Schmidt clearly longs for a closer relationship with his daughter. In a sudden inspiration that emerges out of his restless grief after his wife's death, he decides to travel to Denver in his newly acquired RV to visit his daughter. But she rebuffs that idea, so Schmidt turns his planned trip into a private road trip back into his past. The trip becomes a partially healing reminiscence that helps him assess his life and come to terms with his unrealized dreams.

During this road trip he also comes face-to-face with the depth of his sadness and the lack of intimacy in his life. At an RV campsite one evening, he is invited by a neighboring couple to join them for dinner in their RV. After dinner and a few beers, and while her husband is out, the wife probes Schmidt's true feelings behind his amiable façade. He is overwhelmed by her understanding and compassion. She appears to grasp the extent of his inner grief and anger, and he misreads her empathy as an invitation to the intimacy he deeply misses. Briefly losing his sense of propriety, he makes an awkward move toward intimacy, with painfully embarrassing results.

One of the main strengths of this film is how it brings us into the center of the events in Schmidt's life as they unfold. The director does this not through a highly dramatized and fast-paced style, but rather by a pace and script that allows the spaces and the shifts most of us experience in our conversations with others in everyday life. This understated style of directing and acting is also well suited to bringing out another of the themes of the film. Schmidt's struggle to accept the reality of his life's unfulfilled expectations is paralleled by his deeply ingrained need to maintain a socially acceptable demeanor, while inside he is experiencing anger, grief, and disappointment. Schmidt has been raised with the Midwestern predilection to maintain amiability at all costs in one's social interactions. A large part of the film's strength is in how Nicholson plays out the tension between maintaining this ingrained social decorum while feeling and thinking something radically different on the inside.

This tension reaches its apex when Schmidt is asked to say a few words at his daughter's wedding reception. Inside, he is still dealing with the disappointment of his failure to convince his daughter not to marry her fiancé, Randal, whom Schmidt regards as a "loser," an opinion reinforced when he meets and interacts with Randal's somewhat boorish and emotionally unguarded family (resulting in some of the funniest scenes in the movie). As Schmidt struggles to come up with the socially expected speech of congeniality at the occasion of his daughter's wedding, he teeters on the brink of saying what he really feels. But the same ingrained amiability that has perhaps contributed to his largely passive life wins out, and he ends up giving gracious compliments both to Randal and to each of the family members.

On the way home from the wedding, Schmidt stops at a museum (in Kearney, Nebraska) that portrays the life and contributions of the pioneers who moved west. This stop triggers one more round of introspection for Schmidt (as we hear his voice-over reading his latest letter to his new foster child). Comparing his life to that of the pioneers, he concludes with resignation that his life did not mean much, and that after he dies, no one a couple of generations down will even know he existed (unlike the pioneers). But in the middle of his benighted gloom, he opens a letter from his sponsored foster child: there before him is a simple message and a simple child's drawing that suddenly captures and reveals for him the meaning that has eluded him. A wonderful realization breaks through the fog of his despairing self-evaluation, and in this beautifully expressive final scene, both the film and Schmidt's search come to a meaningful closure.

One sign of a really good film is whether it can be watched a second time with enjoyment and with added meaning. About Schmidt is such a movie. Enjoy it at least once, or more!

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