FilmBlather.com

"Oh, you sad man! You sad, sad man!"

About Schmidt is a very funny movie, and occasionally a touching one. There is a remarkable amount of talent involved, from Jack Nicholson in the lead role to Alexander Payne behind the camera, the latter taking the same sardonically quirky approach he used to such success in Election. I wanted to love it. There is no reason for it not to have worked.

But as you may have gathered, it didn't work, at least not for me. I write this review more than a month before the film is to hit theaters -- and more than a month before you will read it -- but I can already sense my inbox filling with messages containing typically colorful sobriquets worked into vehement proclamations of my terminal idiocy. People will love this movie. You may love it. I found it unforgivably lacking in sincerety, shooting itself in its geriatric foot with its less-sentimental-than-thou tone even while it entertains us with same.

You see, Payne has assembled a collection of brilliant elements here, but not all of them belong in the same movie. Nearly everything he attempts succeeds, but it doesn't all fit. After a short while, I sensed tonal variations beginning to play against each other, jokes -- funny ones -- starting to seem out of place. By the end, the movie ceases to be a moving portrait of a lonely man who sees himself as a failure and becomes a sarcastic, obvious, self-conscious meander through middle class existence, with too many characters, too many stereotypes and too many easy laughs for us to take it seriously.

Yet there is so much here that's genius. Consider the dilemma of the title character, Warren Schmidt, who retires to his golden years only to find his wife, whom he has come to resent, dead from a hemorrhage a few short days later. His daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) is marrying a waterbed salesman (Dermot Mulroney) and Warren is convinced that he isn't good enough for her. In his despair, he sponsors a poor African boy through one of those guilt-trip tv commercials and begins to write ridiculously extended letters to the illiterate child, detailing everything that is going on in his life and providing extensive advice for the starving kid's own future.

Wonderful. This is one of the few recent examples where voiceover narration actually works, without spelling everything out for the cretins in the audience and without providing moronic emotional cues that tell us exactly what reactions we should have lest we be deficient filmgoers. Warren is hilariously misguided -- "...and so, Ndugu..." -- and the film seems to be setting up a neat, cynically observant tone. Remember, this is when we're still laughing with Warren and not at him, as well as when the jokes still have some sort of thematic connection with the rest of the script.

Alas, the movie requires Warren to take a road trip in his Winnebago to attend his daughter's wedding. He stays with the groom's family, led by Kathy Bates, who refers to herself as a very "sexual, orgasmic being" and insists on bathing with the unassuming Mr. Schmidt; at one point we see her naked, in a scene that's like the more infamous one in There's Something About Mary, only sans the prosthetic enhancement. The family is weird, and rude, and uncultured, and the movie thinks it's all very funny.

The last hour of About Schmidt loses its grounding entirely. Payne forgets about his title character, having Nicholson sit there with an eternally befuddled expression on his face while the movie tosses out one idiotic gag after another (spoiler ahead: I think it lost me when Schmidt tried to sabotage his daughter's wedding by refusing to get out of bed). And how do you explain the inclusion of that painfully obvious scene in which Schmidt tries to force himself on a slightly younger woman -- what the hell were they thinking? There was no reason to be that desperate.

The ending is beautiful, almost enough to change one's mind about what came before it, but it isn't earned, especially considering that it follows a veritable parade of trailer-trash idiosyncrasies. It's a great scene, but it is impossible to fully appreciate with the previous sixty minutes in the back of one's mind.

Oh, and Nicholson is amazing, by the way. Just thought I'd include that.