Movie review: Nebraska

I don’t know if this is linguistically accurate, but I've often thought of melancholy as being in the shallow end of the tragedy pool.  Tragedy is looking back on your life and seeing children dying, businesses failing or ambitions thwarted; melancholy is looking back and realizing that you were given lousy options and you still chose poorly.  You married the slightly less unattractive girl but she turned out to be mean and corrosive; you left the family farm for something better and ended up working yourself to death in the city with nothing to show for it; you see relatives at a family reunion that you haven’t seen in years and you wonder what you have in common with these jerks other than DNA.

Alexander Payne’s latest film, Nebraska, drips with melancholy but never wallows in it.  It is peopled with characters from small towns who have small minds and small ambitions, and great regrets about how little progress they made in achieving those dreams.  This isn't the stuff of Shakespeare; no kings, no princes, no dynasties up for grabs, but as the line from Death of a Salesman goes, attention must be paid.

The plot of Nebraska comes from what I believe was a real incident a few years ago when an elderly man made his way to the headquarters of Publishers Clearinghouse because he believed he was the “winner” of a one million dollar prize.  In the movie an aged tippler named Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) is determined to walk from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska because he is convinced he won a million dollars in a sweepstakes and no one will drive him there because they all realize it’s a con.  His younger son, Davy (Will Forte) agrees to drive him to Lincoln, partly to spend some time with his Dad, partly to get him to shut up about the million dollars.

As with much literature (see, The Odyssey) the trip does not go smoothly and father and son end up spending several days in the father’s hometown of Hawthorne, Nebraska.  During the extended stay old friendships are renewed, old scars are re-opened, and Davy makes the uncomfortable realization, that many middle-aged children have, that his elderly parents were once horny teenagers.

The mood of melancholy is enhanced by the cinematography, which is in black and white.  To be more accurate, it is filmed not in black and white but in grey; sometimes the sky is so washed out it looks as if scenes were filmed in front of a white sheet. The film may have been shot on the most glorious spring day in Nebraska history, but every scene looks like it was filmed by Ingmar Bergman during a Scandinavian winter.

Nebraska has received 6 Oscar nominations, all deserved (as if the Academy would nominate someone undeserving): Best Picture, Best Director (Alexander Payne), Best Actor (Bruce Dern), Best Supporting Actress (June Squibb), Best Screenplay (Bob Nelson), Best Cinematography (Phedon Papamichael).  It’s always tough evaluating older actors; you can never be sure how much is acting and how much is just them being, well, old.  Dern is an old pro and a previous nominee, and the Academy has been known to give Oscars to older actors who have knocked around a lot (Christopher Plummer, Alan Arkin, Nick Nolte, James Coburn) so he may have a shot. 

Nebraska is a film that can be appreciated by anyone with an elderly parent who resists all attempts to convince them of anything; or has carried on a feud with a relative so long that neither can recall the details; or by any child who has visited their parents’ hometown and been amazed that they made it out of there alive.  It makes you happy, but also a little melancholy.