Movie Review: About Schmidt

About Schmidt

I'm going to start by telling you right here and now that, while Jack Nicholson never gives a bad performance, he should not have won the Golden Globe for his performance in this movie. Oh, he's good. It's just that Daniel Day-Lewis (who stars in Gangs of New York) is a tour de force who should win anything and everything he's nominated for this year - and who should be nominated for them all. That being said...

About Schmidt is about...well, Schmidt. Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) has just finished a long career as an insurance actuary. As he begins his retirement, he has trouble finding things to fill the hours. In one attempt to stay busy, he sees a commercial on television and spontaneously signs up as the sponsor for a poor child in Africa. His letters to the six year-old boy both occupy him and serve in some ways as therapy as he unburdens himself to his foster son. Meanwhile, his nagging wife dies shortly after his retirement party, which further complicates Warren's life. Everything he's relied on is gone, and he realizes he has nothing else. Nothing, that is, except a daughter in Denver who is about to marry a man Warren doesn't like in the least.

Warren ties up a few loose ends - and creates a few more - and then leaves in his RV to drive from Omaha to Denver for his daughter's wedding and, he hopes, a chance to prevent the wedding from happening. He takes his time traveling, seeing sights from his past he wants to revisit, but he eventually arrives in Colorado to see his daughter and talk her out of marrying. Jeannie Schmidt (Hope Davis), on the other hand, is not about to be manipulated by her father. Her fiancé, Randall Hertzel (Dermot Mulroney) is a lowly waterbed salesman, but a man she loves and who loves her. Randall's eccentricities become all too understandable when Warren stays before the wedding in the Hertzel home and gets to know Randall's twice-divorced mother, Roberta Herzel (Kathy Bates, who performs brilliantly and fearlessly as a free spirited woman who doesn't give a damn what anyone else thinks) and father (a minor role, but played with aplomb by Howard Hesseman).

About Schmidt does a fine job of telling the tale of a man's depression and his efforts to counter his feelings of worthlessness. Unfortunately, depression and worthlessness in an ordinary man - which Schmidt very much is - just aren't that unusual or interesting. Jack Nicholson reins in his wilder aspects and plays Warren Schmidt very much as such a man would certainly behave (he's particularly good after having tried to remedy his stiff neck with a few of Roberta's post-surgery medications), but the fact that his performance is so circumspect leaves viewers little to get excited about. Kathy Bates, also nominated for a Golden Globe for About Schmidt, is terrific. The script is very good, and the editing is brilliant. But small supporting roles and some very cool edits aren't why most of us head out to the theatre, are they?

FAMILY SUITABILITY: About Schmidt is rated R. There's some off-color language and one nude scene, but it's almost certainly the uninhibited reality of a man home alone that makes this movie unsuitable for children. Whether he's making a mess in the bathroom or weeping over his lost wife, scenes like this are not appropriate for the younger set. About Schmidt is probably worth seeing by those 17 and older, but it will also almost certainly be a disappointment after all of the awards hype to which it simply does not measure up.