I got out of the theater showing Nebraska feeling pretty good about myself, and I gradually approached my car. Once inside, I took a deep breath, and then uncontrollably bawled my eyes out. Nebraska is a black and white ninja of sentiment. You won’t know what hit you until the damage has already been done.
Alexander Payne has made a career of directing character dramas with top flight casts exposing their emotional core, unleashing inner turmoil but – usually – proving that they have a sympathetic soul within. That they sometimes behave like assholes is what makes them human. His films are nicely shot but rarely call attention to themselves. His stories sometimes have catchy set-ups but usually spend as much time lingering on how people feel as what they actually do.
The people in Nebraska – the film, probably not the whole state – don’t seem to feel much of anything, and although the film’s grayscale cinematography may stand out in Payne’s cinematic oeuvre the approach is less about creating contrast than neutralizing it. Everything in Nebraska is grey, from the vast plains to the laconic people who live alongside them. Emotions are not to be spoken of except in short, infrequent, immediately forgotten outbursts. Nebraska is a story of what isn’t said.
And what isn’t said is a damned beautiful thing.
Will Forte plays David Grant, a sound system salesman, a jilted boyfriend, and an unimpressive son. His brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk) is on local television. His father Woody (Bruce Dern) and mother Kate (June Squibb) have long since settled into an unremarkable routine of bickering and being bickered at. We hear that Woody is an alcoholic, and didn’t do a particularly good job of being a dad. We see that he’s a shuffling, quiet, overly trusting individual who believes that a marketing sweepstakes offering him a million dollars – in exchange for ordering magazine subscriptions, of course – is the real deal.
So Woody embarks on a journey to Nebraska. The fact that he’s walking there from Montana doesn’t seem to strike him as impractical. As Ross and Kate begin to wonder aloud if the time has come to finally put Woody in a home, David – having nothing better to do anyway – sees this as an opportunity to spend some quality time with the old man, so he agrees to drive Woody to Nebraska to get what David assumes will be some disappointing, albeit highly predictable news about his millions.
CANNES 2013 REVIEW: Fred Topel says “Nebraska has a mellow tone with some mild laughs.”
They don’t bond. In fact, Woody immediately gets drunk, hits his head, and the whole trip gets sidetracked to Woody’s home town, where he quickly, innocently and problematically tells everyone that he’s a millionaire. Believing him, or at least wanting to since the town long since hit the skids and shattered on impact, there are brief bursts of applause followed by one confrontation after another about what Woody owes them after a lifetime of alleged mooching.
David seems to know nothing about his father, and over the course of Nebraska Woody doesn’t offer him much, but the behavior of family and so-called friends shifts so dramatically when they hear the news that David can’t help but learn something about his dad’s past. The old man who can barely get a word in edgewise has impacted a lot of people in ways he himself doesn’t even realize. The man who disappointed David so desperately as a father was the kind of man on whom others depended to the point of taking advantage, and Woody just let them. His father says none of this. Woody doesn’t appear to be the introspective sort.
It’s a kind of detective story in which the detective doesn’t have to try very hard. He just has to pay attention, allow for sympathy, and pick up on little details and contradictions that reveal who his father really is. The pervasive disquiet in all the Grant family living rooms hides a lot of history, and one can only pick up on it if they can get over how awkward all this unexamined living can be. Alexander Payne plops David and the audience right in the middle of the discomfort, and lets us all sit there until it’s so damned frustrating we can’t help but get used to it. Once we do, the real story unfolds… and it is sad, beautiful and revelatory.
Quietness isn’t valued very highly by most people. But it’s amazing what we can learn after folks shut up. Alexander Payne has made in Nebraska a deliberately still motion picture in which the drama took place years ago, but lives on mostly in the silences. It changes perspectives because at first there doesn’t even seem to be any perspective, at least of consequence. At first there was nothing, just a family who didn’t communicate much. Then there was understanding, and then my tears, released for all the things I do not know about loved ones here and gone.
We should talk more. Or at least we should pay closer attention to all the stillness.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
