Nebraska

Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s latest film set in his home state, is the best one so far.  It tells the story of Woody Grant, an aging ne’er-do-well who becomes convinced he’s won a million dollars in a mail-order Sweepstakes contest.  Despite his family’s attempts to convince him otherwise, he insists on making the trip from his home in Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, headquarters of the company that sent him the “winning” letter.  Too old to drive himself, he enlists his youngest son,  David (Will Forte), who reluctantly agrees to take him at least part of the way in the hope his father will come to his senses long before they get to Lincoln.

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.