Actors - About Schmidt

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	Actors - About Schmidt

About Schmidt (2002) is an American film directed by Alexander Payne and starring Jack Nicholson as Warren Schmidt and Hope Davis as his daughter Jeannie. It is based on the 1996 novel of the same title by Louis Begley.

The film begins with the retirement of Schmidt from his position as an actuary in an insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska. Schmidt finds it hard to adjust to his new life and feels useless and impotent. One evening, he is detachedly watching a television advertisement about a foster program for African children. Images of suffering children play before him and something moves within him - perhaps the idea of youth, now lost to him - and he enters the sponsorship program and soon receives an information package with a photo of "his" foster child, a small Tanzanian boy named Ndugu, to whom he relates his life in self-centric letters.

The film is overcast and rather pessimistic from the beginning, Schmidt's doom sensed by the audience as he seems to 'sit down for the last time' in narrating his wasted life to Ndugu. However, the point is that there are great flashes of optimism, of hope for the beaten Schmidt that it may in fact not be too late. Interestingly, the film opens with a death and a funeral, and closes with a wedding. The paradox is that the funeral gives the audience a sense of hope and freedom for Schmidt, that he might regain a life - a passion, a curiosity about the world and a venturing into it, perhaps to see Tanzania and meet Ndugu (the audience hopes), whereas his ultimate chance to break with the humdrum routine of existence which is granted at the wedding is failed, and thus the wedding - an event usually associated with happiness and hope - is when the audience feels final pessimism for the lost and pathetic Schmidt.

Schmidt's life is neither pleasant nor interesting, beautiful nor passionate. He retires from a lifetime's work in an insurance company at an interchangeable retirement dinner at a cheap function centre with its usual plates of beef and boiled broccoli and predictable speeches, recognisable details reminiscent of such novels as It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. He doesn't know what to do with his days now that a lifetime's routine and conditioning is removed from his institutionalised existence and he visits his young successor, a version of whom he himself had been forty years earlier, who impatiently - though with a fake cheeriness - ushers him back out the door with an insincere "welcome back any time" and a handshake, and Schmidt leaves the building only to see the entire contents of his office and working life in the basement, set out for the garbage-collectors. Nothing remains as evidence of his thousands of days spent there.

Nor is there any warmth or engagement in his home life. He describes his longtime alienation from his frumpy and nagging wife, and the audience feels a combination of resentment and pity towards him for trapping himself and being trapped in such a life. However, his wife suddenly dies from a blood clot in her brain. His friends and his daughter Jeannie, from whom he rarely hears but who returns from Denver, briefly console him at a funeral ridden with insincere expressions of condolence and untruthful remarks about what a great woman she had been, with clicheed emotional reactions that contradict themselves through dirty arguments over money and meaningless trivialities such as cheap funeral caskets. Jeannie intends to marry Randall Hertzel (played by Dermot Mulroney), a union opposed by Schmidt, who feels that the dim-witted salesman is not up to any woman's standards, and is especially unsuited to his own daughter. Randall recommends the book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" by Harold Kushner to Schmidt and then tries to entice him into a pyramid scheme. The audience hopes Jeannie will not throw her life away as her father has, and wills Schmidt to 'save' his daughter, and hopes for their reconciliation. But this film is not a fairytale, though it uses humour and emotion brilliantly to keep optimism alive. It is utterly truthful, darkly and wearily honest, the story of a dead man who happens to still be alive, and the dead society in which he has died through passively going along its passages. After the couple returns to Denver, Colorado, Schmidt is again left alone.

His decay continues, weeks of no washing, of sleeping and waking in front of the television, of eating the entire contents of the kitchen, of trips outside with a coat over pyjamas. But hope flares again. He decides to take a journey in his new Winnebago to see his daughter and convince her not to marry. When he phones her to tell her he is coming a few weeks earlier than planned for the wedding, she meanly insists that he only arrive shortly before the wedding. The coldness of the relationships he has had with his empty and boring wife and daughter, both greedy, petty and materialistic women, is clear. The audience feels a mixure of sympathy for how they have treated Schmidt, ganging up on and using him, and of disrespect for his weakness at allowing himself to have been beaten down and used by them, but now feels hope for him, that he will show some backbone no matter how late in life he is. He is not completely blind to his daughter's stupidity - though he loves her deeply because of their kinship, because he needs connections and love - and, through knowing this, the audience feels optimistic for Schmidt.

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