Telluride ’13: Nebraska


Nebraska

***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after
the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and
sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It's
easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour
Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his
crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes
a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce
Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making
it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken
characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named
collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least
possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

Dern is Woody, an elderly Montanan who
believes a sweepstakes entry has informed him that he's won a million
dollars, contingent on his ability to return the letter to the sweepstakes' home
office in Lincoln, NE. He sets off on foot, defiant in the face of harridan
wife Kate (June Squibb, brilliant) and worried sons David (Will Forte) and Ross
(Bob Odenkirk), until finally David, a home sound-system salesman, agrees to drive
Woody from Billings to deep in the heart of Huskerville. It's the journey, of
course, and along the way David is introduced to his father, and he to him, as
adults in all the small, often humiliating, occasionally noble peculiarities that
comprise adults. A stopover in Woody's hometown introduces old bully Ed (Stacy
Keach) and old flame Peg (Angela McEwan), who knew it would never work out with
Woody because she "wouldn't let him round the bases." They're all
beautifully-realized, beautifully-scripted performances: Ed holding court
before a gathering of cronies in a bumpkin watering hole; Kate pulling up her
skirt to show a long-dead admirer what he could have had if he'd stopped
talking about meat once in a while. The film only ever really stumbles with a pair of Tweedle-Dee/Tweedle-Dum
cousins (Kevin Kunkel, Devin Ratray) who function essentially like the black
chef in Sullivan's Travels. When they're the focus of a late-film
plot point, the nature of their contrivance is obvious.

Still, Nebraska's grace is in the ways
the relationship evolves between Woody and David–in the gradual discovery
that Woody isn't a crotchety old guy cliché, but a man broken by a lifetime of
meekness taken advantage of by the small-time predators in his Midwestern town.
His quest isn't driven by adorable dementia, then, so much as one last chance
to be special in a life spent ordinary. Kate's crustiness comes clearer, too,
as Woody's armour, while David, following a series of acts (one of violence, two of
generosity) and lies that fool no one, demonstrates in a lovely metaphorical
gesture everything that need be said about fathers, sons, the gulfs of
misunderstanding separating them, and the bridges that can yet be rigged.

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