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This is what you need to know About
Schmidt: he’s 66 years old, has just
retired from Woodman Insurance, and can
accurately predict an individual’s
life expectancy. He has been married for
forty-two years, he has a daughter
(who he doesn’t picture past the age of eight),
and he assumes he has about
nine years left.
So begins the darkly
comedic, existential journey of Warren Schmidt (Jack
Nicholson), a modern day Willie
Loman on a quest for meaning. In a state-of-
the-art mobile home, Schmidt heads across
the American heartland to stop his
daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis), from marrying a
mullet-headed underachieving
waterbed salesman, Randall (Dermot Mulroney) — but this
is only a vehicle for
a voyage that is as spiritual as it is physical. His entire
adventure is uniquely narrated in the form of letters he writes to his nine-year-old
Tanzanian foster child, Ndugu, confessing things he hasn’t told anyone else, while also
demonstrating his general ignorance of the world.
Schmidt, like Loman —
the broken, pathetic protagonist from Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman —
has spent his entire life as a conformist in pursuit of the American dream. At the end
of the road, he finds himself bitter, betrayed, angry, afraid, and ultimately lost. In
Schmidt as in Salesman, this
theme is repeatedly observed. Here, the
cow being lead to the slaughter, marks the most definitive symbol — from the very
beginning, at Schmidt’s retirement party, his photograph is shown immediately after a
picture of the restaurant’s prize-winning calf, and slaughterhouse trucks appear
throughout his journey to underscore the point. Furthermore, Nicholson, one of the
founding fathers of the Hollywood Bad Boy image, executes his portrayal of the character
with a resounding authenticity.
At a time when most drama is sliding the
slippery slope of sentimental sap by wrapping up every loose end in happy Hollywood bow,
it would have been very easy for About Schmidt to over sentimentalize.
Nonetheless, the film
remains genuine throughout, even imparting its redemptive
message of hope in
a morbidly wry manner that makes it all the more significant.
