Schmidt replaces Smith as everyman moniker. 'About Schmidt'

Somewhere around the mid-90s, Jack Nicholson started down a brilliant road. A road, unfortunately, that several other ‘older’ actors are not on (most notably, Robert DeNiro, and Al Pacino). That road, which gave us such movies/performances as ‘Blood and Wine’, ‘As Good As It Gets’, ‘The Pledge’, and now ‘About Schmidt’, is the one whereupon Jack decided to stop just playing Jack Nicholson, and start acting again. There are a lot of things to say ‘About Schmidt’, but the main one is that Jack deserves all the nods he’s received, and I think at least one more.

‘About Schmidt’, first off, lays its cards on the table in a manner uncharacteristic not only of movies, but especially of such a slow-paced, definitively-toned picture. We enter the film with Schmidt (Jack) sitting in a virtually empty office counting the remaining ticks to five o’clock, and we know exactly where we’re going. It’s Schmidt’s last day before retirement. As we move to the retirement party, everyone says the exact wrong thing by virtue of trying to say the exact right thing, and Schmidt’s reactions tell us everything we need to know about the entire story. We’re into the movie some ten or fifteen minutes, and apart from a few of the details and minutiae, we’ve got Schmidt down. On the one hand, we have a few excellent scenes working our introduction here. Buckets of information are given to us without us ever feeling that we’re being pushed around. On the other hand, part of the point is that it’s pretty easy to ‘get Schmidt down’.

Schmidt, like everyone, once had big dreams, and like most everyone, reality got hold of him, and the next thing he knew he’d spent thirty-odd years in the insurance business. Here comes his retirement, and though one of his friends offers a toast at the party saying that Schmidt is a truly rich man, he does so in such a way as to all but force Schmidt to wonder what the hell it all amounted to anyway.

Before we manage to get completely away from the introduction, Schmidt, in a pit of ‘not making any difference’, succumbs to a foreign aid charity infomercial, and calls in a pledge to become the ‘foster parent’ of a child in a third-world country. We notice that he attempts to do so on the sly, his wife obviously doing most of the pant-wearing in the family. Schmidt soon receives his package of good will, along with a picture of his ‘foster child’ Ndugu. The charity encourages him to write a personal letter to his child, and Schmidt lets loose. Ramblings of domineering wives, upstart punks with fancy degrees taking over positions, and random frustrations spill onto the page. ‘Dear Ndugu’ begins many a voice-over narration ‘to confidante’ episode throughout the movie.

Schmidt hardly has the slightest chance to make some attempt at a retirement routine when his wife suddenly dies. One late life tragedy on top of another, and Schmidt is set adrift in a world now wholly unknown. Now throw in that his daughter, and only child, is not only set to marry a moron redneck in the very near future, but also accuses him of buying the cheapest casket available for his wife, and we’ve got all the details to go with the generalities we got from our introduction. Schmidt is running on empty. At his retirement party they all told him it was all worth it, because he worked his whole life for his family, and all that entails. His wife, his daughter, security for the future, a house, and etc., etc. And, here he is. His wife’s dead (and he wasn’t especially happy with her in any case), his daughter doesn’t have much interest in him, but he has to pay for a wedding that makes him crazy, and he has a huge recreational vehicle in the drive that he never wanted in the first place.

You get all this information earlier in the movie than you’d expect and, I think, it’s the better movie for it. During the rest of the movie we watch Schmidt try to deal with things, decide he’s going to try and stop his daughter’s wedding, muddle through everything, and not really get anywhere in the end. What we don’t do, for most of the movie, is really learn anything new. We only further explore the character, the situation, the life. There isn’t a plot exactly, there’s only what happened, and that’s a different idea. Oddly, dangerously even, we know we’re in for the same old, ‘retiring everyman looks back at life and wonders, what the hell just happened there’, and the movie has no answers, not even any theories exactly, just a depressingly honest statement of fact.


Obviously, this is a movie that lives or dies based on the performances put into it, and as I’ve mentioned, Nicholson gives among the best performances of his career. I think that’s perhaps saying something. The supporting cast does its job, but frankly I didn’t notice anyone standing out, and I didn’t care. Dermot Mulroney (‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’, ‘Lovely & Amazing), as Schmidt’s soon-to-be son-in-law was serviceable in a way that only Dermot Mulroney can be. Kathy Bates as the positively kooky mother of said son-in-law was quite good, and this despite my thinking that she is generally overrated. Apart from that, Howard Hesseman got a check, and I like to see that happen. Whatever else any of the other actors may have done, this is all Nicholson’s show.

Writer/Director Alexander Payne (the excellent ‘Election’, and the not bad ‘Citizen Ruth’) puts together a very impressive effort here. ‘About Schmidt’ is a movie of moments, but more importantly, it’s long, slow movie of moments, and that’s a tricky beast. Holding it all together, and delivering moments that are at once all but completely foreseen and in some sense unimportant, while still managing to convey meaning and hold interest is simply masterful work. The camera is practically a character (or facet of our character) in this movie, and manages to pull Schmidt out of the aether and solidify him more even than Jack’s often brilliant facial expressions, or the ‘tell all’ narrations.


At the end of the movie, Schmidt returns home from a soul-searching road-trip that eventually turns into his trip to his daughter’s wedding. He pushes past the piles of mail and into the house, and begins his soliloquy to unimportance. There is a very real sense in which these final moments are actually the entire movie. We just needed the rest of it to get to the real movie. It’s not simply that we’re led up to the ending. This last scene is in itself complete. That is its own depressing thought in an entirely depressing film.

A man looks at life, and puts forward some of the age old thoughts. When I die, and when everybody that ever knew me dies, it will be as though I never existed at all. But maybe, and it’s not an easy idea, there’s another way to read that sentence. Maybe you add it all together and come up with nothing. But, maybe you don’t. The trickiest bit here, among a slew of tricky bits, is the seemingly incoherent statement (that everybody knew anyway) that what life gets in the way of, is life.

The most difficult stories to tell, and it makes perfect sense, are the ones where we admit that life sucks. Who wants to hear that story? I want to hear the story about how life is great, or barring that option, the story where life only seems like it sucks, but it turns out that it isn’t so bad after all. ‘About Schmidt’ doesn’t mess about in this area. It takes a big ‘Life Sucks’ spike, and drives it straight into your skull. But, because it does so, it has one of the biggest, best, and nevertheless least fulfilling payoffs in the history of movies. At the end of ‘About Schmidt’ you either cry, or you’re already dead.


If you don’t like it, I’ll be surprised. If you watch it more than once, I’ll be thoroughly impressed.


Jack Nicholson won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama. When he won he remarked that he thought he was doing comedy, which was followed by many confused looks, and polite giggles as though it were at that point that he was doing comedy. But, I’m with Jack. If this ain’t comedy, nothing is.