Small Town Folk like All of Us

People tend to forget that more than half the population of the United States live in small towns. A good portion of the other half, the one that lives in cities larger than 25,000 people, probably came from a small town. So, few will not recognize the folks and places that form the beautiful quilt of characters that is Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. This is a small-town film, but it is also somewhat of a road movie, something that Payne has already filmed before in Sideways and About Schmidt. In both cases, it is a poignant film very much worth seeing.

Before I dive into all the things I loved about this movie, I have to express my delight in the director, Alexander Payne himself, and the quasi documentary style he has developed in movies like Nebraska, Sideways and The Descendants; I call it so because he presents situations that ordinary, non-famous people like most of us live, without judgment and without pushing feelings or circumstances. The movies feel authentic and it is the situations we recognize in our families, our friends or acquaintances, which allow us to bring emotions to what he presents. It is noteworthy, in speaking of this documentary style, that Payne frequently uses non-actors to play minor characters in his movies; actual policemen, restaurant servers, teachers, etc. Payne also injects his films with a dry, many times dark and cynical humor, but a great sense of humor none the less. There are, after all, many things funny in even the most difficult situations.  This humor is forefront in his earlier movies, like Election (probably the best acting Reese Witherspoon has ever accomplished) or Citizen Ruth (with Laura Dern, Bruce Dern's daughter), but it also very present even in the more dramatic films like Nebraska, Sideways or The Descendants.

Bruce Dern and Will Forte in Nebraska

Nebraska is visually beautiful. It was a brilliant choice of the director to film the movie in black- and-white; mostly striking shades of gray, to tell the truth. The choice of black-and-white adds so much to the movie! The landscape, dry and barren; the small towns made more abandoned by the lack of color; the older generation, with their already white hair, and the close ups that without color add so much depth to their expressions. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, who worked with Payne in Sideways and The Descendants, but who has also shown his skill in movies like 3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line and The Pursuit of Happyness, does wonders with his black-and-white compositions in this film.

But it is the acting that makes this film a prize winner. Bruce Dern, who plays the grouchy, confused, old melancholic alcoholic who is Woody Grant, has already won the Best Actor prize at Cannes and is pretty much on all the best actor lists for other prizes this year. In the movie he is married to June Squib, his acid-tongued wife Kate, who not only complements his acting, but dominates a good portion of the film with her great acting as well. Will Forte plays one of their two sons, the one that decides to accompany his father on a road trip to appease Woody, who has fallen for a junk mail announcement of a million dollar sweepstake. This is probably the most questionable casting of the film since Forte is known more for his parts as a comedian and in the movie he has to play probably the most serious part of the film, the son who has lived all his life with this remote and cold man as a father, whom he has loved in this one-sided relationship. He pulls it off.

In end, Will Forte’s character reminded me of another son in another great film about parent – child relationships: Daniel Bruhl’s character, Alexander Kerner, in the great German film Good-bye Lenin; both sons are desperate to please their parents and create a closeness that never was, guided by the hope that it is never too late for it to be.

Payne is from Omaha Nebraska. He knows these small towns and their people well. Woody and his son drive from Billings Montana to a small town in Nebraska (really Plainview, but given another name in the movie), where he is reunited with his family, friends and his past. The characters unfold in the most subtle of ways, as do their life stories.  We slowly become aware of how this couple and their sons have become the distant, bitter, sharp-tongued people they are and we witness how they can still, in some strange way, be redeemed. The background of the small town, almost a ghost town, enhances these every day relationships that are, after all, what life and this movie is all about.