Nebraska Review
By David Kempler
Payneful Nebraska
I am all over the place when evaluating Alexander Payne, the obviously gifted director. "
Sideways" in my opinion was his best, while I was terribly disappointed by "
The Descendants", but I admit I was in the minority with my evaluation of that one.
"Nebraska", if you read a synopsis of it, would seem like not much of a story, even a short one, but it is not really about what it is supposed to be about. The plot is that Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), an elderly gentleman in Montana, receives one of those things in the mail that tells him he has won a million dollars. When you get mail like that, you quickly toss it into the nearest garbage can, but Woody believes it and he wants to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect his winnings.
Woody sets out on foot until a cop grabs him while he is walking on the ramp to a highway. The cop takes him back home to Kate, his acid-tongued wife, played by June Squibb. She rips him apart, something it is clear she has done many times before. Their son, David (Will Forte), is not particularly successful nor a failure. He is quiet and tries to keep things at an even keel between his parents.
What "Nebraska" is really about is the relationships between a family, including the extended part, and the relationships between a man and his old buddies from his home town. Primarily, though, it is a buddy film and a road film, with Woody and David as the pair in the spotlight.
Filmed in black and white, this at times bleak tale is made even more bleak because of its lack of color. Payne does a great job of capturing an American family out of the mainstream of typical film characters. While at first they seem two-dimensional, everyone gets fleshed out during the physical and emotional journey, until you are not quite sure if you like or dislike them. By the end, you can figure it out easily enough, but by keeping parts of the personalities hidden, Payne builds "Nebraska" to a crescendo that maintains an air of peacefulness.
Dern does a great job in the lead as a somewhat detached and not always coherent older man. It is a bit similar to his turn on the HBO series "Big Love", but it might just earn him a much deserved nomination. "Nebraska" isn't "Sideways" but it it's not too far behind. I am once again a fan of Payne.
