About Schmidt    

Rated R for some language and brief nudity

Runtime: 125 min

Starring Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates and Hope Davis

Directed by Alexander Payne   

What can you say about Jack Nicholson, the man everyone loves to hate?  The bad boy of Mulholland Drive is back and reborn as Warren Schmidt, a plodding insurance actuary retiring after 35 years, to a very uncertain future. 

The good thing about Nicholson is that he never turns down a challenge to do something new.  The great movie roles are bad guys (even if it’s bad guys you love to hate) and Jack has played some of the best.  From the classic alienated drifter in “Five Easy Pieces”, to Jake Giddes in the immortal “Chinatown,” to psycho marine Col. Nathan R. Jessep  in “A Few Good Men,” he has excelled in playing the anti-social iconoclast who doesn’t care what you think.  As bad as he was, he always knew what was best for himself (and, more-or-less, everyone else).

What a shock, then, to see him in his new role as a man going through too many changes much too fast.  He loses his job, his wife and his daughter in less time than it takes to buy a life insurance policy and strikes out on the road in his Winnebago.  A grumpy, lost and confused old man trying to find his new identity on the road.

There have not been too many things that have happened to Nicholson in his previous roles.  He is usually happening to someone else, to their dismay.  Retirement almost caught him in 2001 as detective Jerry Black in “The Pledge,” but he fought it off long enough to find out who done it.  But we saw the beginning of a certain, well, softening, if one could use such a word in describing Jack.  Same as in “The Crossing Guard.”  He was still the solitary man, the obsessive loner looking for a connection, but at least he wasn’t burning bridges as fast as he saw them.

Retirement from a lifetime of mediocrity as an actuary at Woodman’s Insurance happens to Warren Schmidt, big time.  The movie opens with him alone, in his dismantled office, waiting for the clock to strike that last five-o-clock bell.  Freedom at last.  But the blank, stripped-down office walls blast us with Schmidt’s blank, stripped-down view of his life, past and future.  Young Turks at Woodman’s Insurance are snapping at his heels.  His beloved files, the total essence of his existence, have been torn from the cabinets; relegated to cardboard boxes awaiting their final meeting with the dumpster.  Can Schmidt himself be far behind?

We watch Schmidt nailed to the cross at his retirement party; the target of lame, ill-considered and drunken farewells from his paper buddies.  We do some quick math and estimate how many years remain until we retire.  We feel uneasy. 

The fact is, after all these years our hero has precious little identity beyond that of an insurance man.  His wife handles the house and Warren is left to watch over his daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis), an aging maiden with worries of growing old alone (in fact he never watches over her at all, but he thinks he does).

So as luck would have it she’s the first to leave; abandoning her ever-organized and rock-steady dad for the feckless Randall Hertzel (Dermot Mulroney).  Schmidt is so immersed in his accounts he wouldn’t pick up a winning lottery ticket if it landed at his feet.  Randall, on the other hand, sees a million dollars under every wad of chewing gum on the sidewalk.  A water bed salesman dreaming of pyramid schemes, he has won the heart of Warren’s fair Jeannie.  Jack watches in horror as the day of the wedding approaches.

To complete Jack’s displacement, his wife Helen (June Squibb) dies.  It was she who had such great plans for their retirement: riding into the sunset in the new Winnebago.  She fixes a nice dinner for jack and insists they eat in the RV, just to see the fun that awaits on the road.  Unfortunately, before she clocks her first mile in the Winnie she goes to the big KOA in the sky.  She dies as she had lived, cleaning the house.  At least she didn’t have to watch a younger woman take her mop and clean the house better, as Jack has to watch the exuberance of youth wash away his mark at Woodman’s.

Dragging himself through the house, Schmidt falls on the final humiliation.  Love letters between Helen and (who else?) Jack’s best friend.  They are old, moldering in a drawer, buried deep beneath his wife’s clothing.  But to Warren they might have been written yesterday.  His entire cuckolded life flashes before his eyes: years at his desk, never an errant sum, never a day missed, never a promise unkept.  And to what end?

Fed up and not taking it any more, Jack piles the Winnebago full of junk food, jumps into the driver’s seat and roars down the highway.  You can still see him as the cast-off pianist in “Five Easy Pieces,” playing out his heart to the horizon as he runs from the devils he knows to those he doesn’t.  Bouncing like a pin-ball from one disillusion to the next and his way to the final showdown at his daughter’s wedding.

In the course of exploring his last frontier, he runs into Roberta (Kathy Bates), the mother of his cockeyed future son in law.  Roberta does little to assuage his ill feelings about the years ahead.  She has every right to look and act as old as he does, but instead carries on like a college girl on spring break at Fort Lauderdale.  In a wonderful bit of role-switching, she plays the self-confident non-conformist that Nicholson was in his previous screen lives.  And she plays it to a tee, throwing the role back at Jack as she throws herself topless into the spa with the terrified Warren Schmidt.

This is it, ladies and gentlemen, never before seen on screen: Jack running away from a naked woman in a hot tub!  That will be a scene to remember.

What follows is the final playing out of Jack’s illusions about his role as husband, father and provider: the final transition from bringing home the bacon to passing the baton.  Or is it living life, finally, instead of the surrogate existence of the nine-to-five career?

Very spiffy performances by Howard Hesseman as Larry Hertzel, the feckless father of Warren’s son-in-law to be, and Len Cariou as Ray Nichols, Jack’s former best friend and his wife’s former paramour.  See it soon at the Myrna!