Midway, they stop in the small Nebraska town of
Hawthorne, where Woody grew up and where his surviving brothers and their
families still live. It’s not an entirely happy reunion because Woody’s
lifelong alcoholism and wayward behavior as a young man had strained relations
between them even before he moved away. But nevertheless the family
gathers to celebrate Woody’s good fortune, to the increasing exasperation
of David, who is
still trying to convince his father he hasn’t really won anything. Despite his efforts to keep the story
from spreading further, word that Woody is a millionaire quickly gets around
town, and old friends and acquaintances come out of the woodwork to
congratulate him, in particular his old business partner (Stacy Keach), who has
a very personal reason for doing so.
Spare and laconic in style, much
like the people it depicts, Nebraska might
strike one at first as a short story stretched beyond its limits. But the
slightness of the premise is deceptive—Nebraska
is more ambitious than it first appears, just as the seemingly one-dimensional
lives of its characters are more complicated and nuanced than we might
expect. As a comedy-drama about the Midwest, Nebraska indulges in its share of easy jokes about
the boredom of small town life among its conversation-challenged
inhabitants. But as much enjoyment as the film gets from
stereotypes of taciturn family gatherings and old-timers hunkered over
bottomless glasses of beer at the local tavern, it’s also part of Payne’s purpose to
upend those patronizing images and expose the complex humanity beneath them.
When Woody’s wife Kate (a
hilariously cranky and profane June Squibb) and elder son Ross (Bob
Odenkirk) join the clan in Hawthorne, the stage is set for the airing of
grievances and pent-up emotions that’s been a lifetime in coming. The
consequences of Woody’s hard drinking, financial irresponsibility, and
indifferent parenting rise to the surface in a series of scenes remarkable for
the easy way they
sustain a natural sense of humor through the moments of greatest tension. Bob Nelson‘s script walks a tightrope
between these competing
moods to perfection, and the results are
gentler and sweeter than most family-showdown dramas.
Payne’s look at the Midwestern
landscape is pretty affectionate overall, so it’s interesting that he chose
to shoot his film in black and white. Filmmakers often eliminate color from the
image to represent dreariness or sterility, and certainly Woody’s
world must appear colorless to him much of the time, drained of hope
by age, and by sorrow. But cinematographer Phedon Papamichael‘s
subdued compositions, while occasionally stark in outline, are never
bleak in expression. The camera‘s lingering gaze at empty
fields and idle main streets never conveys Nothingness—on the contrary, the
richness of detail and subtle play of light and shade that are uncovered hint at a variegated
experience often missing from portrayals of rural and small town life.
“Black and white” is a
misnomer, anyway, failing
to take into account the infinite range of
grays between those two extremes. Nebraska
is a film of extremes only at first glance. In black and white, the world
can appear at its harshest and least forgiving, but it also can yield up form
and pattern often obscured by the distractions of a brighter palette. Most significantly, the
lack of external color focuses our awareness on the film’s interiority. Nebraska
contains little action--the drama is mainly inside the characters, most of whom
have never learned to verbalize their internal conflicts and desires very
clearly. Stripped of color, the film's sparse exteriors become transparent to the dimensions of
feeling and complicated understanding hidden behind their ordinariness.
The black-and-white look also
brings Bruce Dern full circle, back to the beginning of his career. A
dependably nasty presence in TV shows and low-budget movies of the early 1960s,
Dern haunts many Baby Boomers’ b & w nightmares. Here his unkempt
appearance and surly behavior hark back to his early screen persona as bad guy
and ultimate creep. A later attempt to move into leading-man roles
failed, and Dern’s career has been on Hollywood’s back burner for the past two
decades. Now something of a cult figure, Dern turns Woody into the very
definition of a comeback role. He doesn’t do anything particularly extraordinary—he’s
always been this good—but his focus on defining his character is so intense it
gives the leisurely, episodic narrative an almost relentless drive.
Other geezer-on-a-life-defining-odyssey films are usually more
relaxed and folksy—think The Straight
Story or Harry and Tonto.
But Nebraska burns with the
fuel of Dern’s whole career behind it, and the film’s weird nostalgia
owes as much to the actor’s bruised reputation as it does to the ups and
downs of Woody’s own life--and probably more. With his face as furrowed as the landscape around him, his unbrushed mane of white hair standing goofily on end, Dern often looks
like a tree bent sideways in the wind. He and Woody remain standing at
film’s end, though. For both of them, Nebraska is a successful journey home.
