Gotham Diary:
The Discounting of Beauty
17 January 2014
Nebraska is a light comedy that ends with all the satisfactions of a well-told fairy tale. Alexander Payne rarely allows his film to stray far from a laugh line. The funny bits would not be out of place in a good reel of Laurel and Hardy. It’s important to stress this at the outset. Watching Nebraska is fun. It is, arguably, a bit slow; several people walked out of the screening that I attended yesterday. Nebraska is probably more fun for viewers like me than it is for people who have never taken a film course. But I was certainly not the only person laughing.
Strangely, however, this fun is consumed by the viewing. As soon as I walked out of the theatre, it was difficult to recall anything about Nebraska that wouldn’t sound depressing in the telling. Within the hour, I was seized by a virtual panic, imagining what it would be like to spend as much as an hour in the fictional town of Hawthorne, Nebraska, where most of the action takes place (a town called Plainview served as the location, according to IMDb). Shot in black and white, Nebraska unrolls a massive collection of stark images that recall the work of the great American photographers of the early-to-mid Twentieth Century, such as Walker Evans and Edward Weston. Visually, Nebraska is bracingly austere. There is nothing remotely amusing about the look of the film, which is, rather, intensely haunting.
What makes Nebraska special is, of course, Alexander Payne’s secret powder, the ingredients of which become a little less secret with each new release. Payne has a way of looking at American life that, while frowning, falls far short of scolding. It occurred to me after Nebraska that Payne is not so much a social critic as he is a collector of bad habits, some of them worse than others but most only faintly vicious. The worst, or at any rate the most pervasive, of bad habits on display in Nebraska is the discounting of beauty in everyday life. Any kind of beauty that you can think of — from handsome architecture and well-tended appearance to interesting conversation and disciplined imagination; call it “poetry” if that suits you better — is absent from the lives of these people. Decoration is meretricious, and entertainment banale. These are settlers who have settled down but stopped there, with the erection of structures that are only more durable than the ones they have replaced. There is no evidence that anyone is aware of the surrounding natural beauty; Payne has a way of shooting it, of putting it on film, that somehow underscores his characters’ non-recognition. Without beauty, these folks lead very small lives.
The trick is that we don’t see this while the film is running. We’re caught up in the slow-motion adventure of David Grant, a decent, if not very focused man with a modest living in Billings, Montana. David’s father, Woody, believes that he has won a million dollars from one of those magazine subscription outfits, and that all he has to do is get himself to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect his prize. The problem is, Woody is not allowed to drive anymore. He drinks too much. He has been drinking too much since he got back from Korea, a long time ago. Just how well his brain works remains something of a mystery, but I think it fair to say that he seizes on the clearance-house letter, which his wife and sons insist means nothing, as a vital antidepressant. His motivation is quite literally Quixotic.
If no one will drive him to Lincoln, then Woody will walk. But he’s not well-prepared to do that, either, and he never makes it out of town. Kindly cops detain him, and bring him home. At just about the right moment in the film’s running time, Woody wears down David’s resistance. While Kate Grant, Woody’s wife and David’s mother, hurls imprecations from the driveway, father and son strap themselves into David’s car, and take off in a south-easterly direction.
Owing to minor misadventures, they land in Hawthorne, the town where Woody and Kate grew up. It is sort of on the way to Lincoln, but Payne keeps us guessing whether that city will ever be reached. Stalled in Hawthorne, David learns a lot about his parents, mostly in comic episodes. And when the townspeople hear about Woody’s million dollars, they get pretty funny, too. But when the movie is over, all you remember is their venality, and David’s brooding resignation.
Bruce Dern, playing Woody, is the big star of this film, and he does a wonderful job at keeping Woody’s inscrutable cussedness from becoming repulsive to the audience. Woody’s eruptions of lucidity ought to be exasperating, but they’re too funny, too well shaped and aimed. But as far as I’m concerned the picture belongs to Will Forte, who plays David. His good looks incline to the delicate and boyish, and in black and white his eyes are large, soft, and dark. there is a crinkle to the left side of his mouth that approaches but stops well short of a sneer. His voice is somewhat querulous. George Clooney has nothing to worry about (although he seems much more than nine years older). Mr Forte is perfect in the part, a quiet giant of modest decency. His David is a boy who becomes a man before our eyes, reluctantly but resolutely. He shows us David beginning to see his parents as fully three-dimensional human beings for the first time in his life. The adventure is truly his; Woody may be Quixote, but David is no sidekick. Years from now, it may be wondered why Mr Dern got the Best Actor nomination, and not Mr Forte. That’s what sometimes happens when an actor’s first serious performance is a great one.
June Squibb plays Kate Grant with a wickedly unhurried exuberance. She is the film’s social critic, and her relentless exposure of the hypocrisy of others has the effect of telling us things about Woody that he cannot. We learn that Woody is good-hearted and trusting — the most irritating thing, to Kate, about his belief in the million-dollar letter is that it is so tiresomely characteristic. Tim Driscoll and Devin Rattray make such a well-matched pair of toothy, knuckleheaded cousins that it’s hard to believe that they’re not brothers in real life, or even related. Mary Louise Wilson, as their mother, busies herself with keeping her heartland shine from being tarnished by too much reality. Stacy Keach gives us, effortlessly, it seems, a small-town bully whose opening gambit is the unctuous word delivered with a dreadful smile.
So sweetly appealing is Angela McEwan’s Peg Nagy — an old flame of Woody’s and now the town’s newspaper publisher — that she really must have her own paragraph.
The actors playing Woody’s many brothers are too numerous to mention, but they compose the most awful scene in the movie: a roomful of men, still and silent as corpses, staring at a football game. The shot captures them head-on, with the game offscreen. If they knew what they looked like — but how could they? They see only what is supposed to be there. That’s another bad habit, if one not unrelated to the discounting of beauty.