Jack revels in older role

Jack revelling in his latest role

10 April 2012

You can see instantly why Jack Nicholson is Hollywood's finest actor, even if his new film hardly matches his best. Jack holds you. My God, how he holds you.

As About Schmidt opens, he's sitting immobile at his executive's desk: a Buddha in a business suit. His scowl sinks to whitecollar level. His eyes are fixed on the wall clock, as if facing a firing squad.

The execution hand ticks round to the hour - and life, as Warren Schmidt has known it for 66 years, comes to an end.

Alexander Payne's film is not about a mid-life crisis, but an endoflife one. It is a comedy about retirement catching up with a man no longer asking "What does it all mean?" but "Is this all there was?" Actually, it's lighter than this sounds.

Payne based About Schmidt on a Louis Begley novel that centres on a rich insurance executive in John Cheever country, New England, but then lowered the story a social notch.

He relocated it in his homeland, Omaha's business belt, and spatched in a script that takes the story into Denver's cranky communities and the swathes of America in between that Schmidt tours in a mobile home as big as a London bus.

This accounts for a bumpy, uneven, lurching narrative, but gives Nicholson the driver's wheel. It's rich in detail, broad in comedy and subtle in penetration; but without its star, it would be commonplace.

Tiger Jack, the Hollywood maverick, allows himself to be tamed and caged by Schmidt's lifedenying values, represented by the actuarial tables he has devised that tell when a person is likely to die.

Only after retirement comes his own painful personal epiphany. Every former executive will flinch at Schmidt seeing his imagined indispensability run through the heartless shredder of his successor's forced welcome each time he "drops in" at the old office.

His home life is even worse. "Who is this old woman beside me?" he asks himself, glancing at his wife of 40 years, a house-proud matron (June Squibb) whose humdrum tyranny even forces him to pee sitting down. Then she dies, suddenly and semi-comically, a trail of detergent leading him to the body in the kitchen.

Bereavement brings release - now he can splash all he wants in the bathroom. It brings bad surprises, too: old love letters to his wife from his best buddy. After throwing a few punches, Schmidt's testosteroneenjoys a comeback and he embarks in his mobile home for a trip into the self-discovery of what was, might have been and - fooling himself - still could be.

Nicholson, at 65, is at the time of his own professional life when, far from closing, new roles are opening for him. In his last film, The Pledge, he played another retiree, a cop who vows to track down a child killer but finds only existential madness at the end of the trail.

About Schmidt covers a slice of the same ground, but without crime, and with loneliness the penalty. Oddly, Schmidt, too, makes a vow to a child. Before embarking on his odyssey, he adopts a black orphan in Africa, writing advice on life ("when the time comes for you to join your fraternity house ...") that's weirdly out of kilter with Third World realities.

At first, this is amusing, then uncomfortably exploitative: even an Omaha actuary couldn't be that selfabsorbed. It's the first little seed of mistrust that Payne's handiwork sows. He wants to reveal Schmidt's barren soul, but also to reconcile us to his eventual fate: the sentimental packaging of a little bit of compassion for a far-away kid is an easy trick and an unworthy one.

But the compensations of Nicholson's self-discovery are great. Schmidt's most painful pitfall from hope to humiliation occurs on a stop in a trailer park where the over-friendly exuberance of a married couple of fellow travellers tempts him to make a pass at the wife. Loss of dignity is more poignant than loss of opportunity. It opens the window a peep more on the man's desperation that Nicholson keeps in perfect equilibrium with his decency.

Once he hits Denver, the film becomes cruder, coarser, far less sure of where Schmidt is headed: his unsympathetic daughter (Hope Davis) is about to marry into a dysfunctional family from the 'burbs that makes the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm appear mild and merely moody.

His future son-in-law (Dermot Mulroney), a waterbed salesman, is a hairy buffoon with a Fu Manchu moustache and a scrub-brush haircut. Family feeding manners are zoolike in intensity. This grungy pack is trailer trash - without the trailer.

A comedy of manners quickly broadens into a farcical sitcom. This is probably the penalty of Payne's spatchcocked screenplay and maybe a lack of confidence in reaching a mainstream audience by concentrating on a character study. Forced into the guest bedroom (and on to the waterbed for a queasy night of pitchand-toss),

Nicholson meets his comic match in Schmidt's putative in-law, the great Kathy Bates as a twicedivorced hippy mom, who sees this well-off widower as a late-life catch and advances on him stark naked in the hot tub. It's the "money scene" in a film with worthier aspirations than a show of cellulite.

Payne's bitter campus comedy, Election, showed him performing satirical surgery on the young American dream. On About Schmidt, he bungles dissecting the dream's end.

It is Nicholson whose professional ballast consistently rallies and steadies the film - even at its rockiest, at the hilarious but ineptly placed wedding reception at which he's required to make a speech and itches to tell the world what he thinks of it.