Nebraska (2013)

For a comedy about a father and son road trip, the world of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska feels strangely post-apocalyptic. The roads are barren, the buildings are boarded up, and the few people that are left feel less like inhabitants and more like survivors of some massive disaster that nobody talks about. This is a world without much of a future, but its one redeeming quality is that it has a rather fascinating past. As the action travels from Montana to the titular state of Nebraska, our characters seem to get a clearer view of what their history was like. At the center of it all is a man near the end of his life. He is obviously disappointed in what he has done so far, and when he sees one last chance at leaving an impact he becomes so engrossed that he is unable to see reason. His life has blown by so quickly and without ceremony that he overreacts when faced with even a tiny glimmer of excitement. It’s a rather bleak view of Midwestern America, but Payne is able to find some beauty in it all the same.

The man I speak of is Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), an aging man from Billings, Montana who receives a clearly bogus letter in the mail informing him that he has won $1 million, and that he should travel to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his winnings. After several foiled attempts to get there on foot, his son David (Will Forte) eventually decides to suck it up and take his father on this trip to certain disappointment. Along the way they stop in Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne, Nebraska to meet up with old family and friends who haven’t been seen in years. Woody’s wife (June Squibb) and other son (Bob Odenkirk) also come in for a visit, but none of this changes his absolute need to get to Lincoln and collect his nonexistent winnings as quickly as possible. The problems only get worse once Woody informs his old friends of the contest, and at that point the vultures begin to swarm.

Shot in a black-and-white style that only accentuates the barren landscapes in which Payne is shooting, Nebraska is a terrific film that reflects on a considerable past without getting overly sappy about it. In one scene, Forte’s David goes to talk to the editor of the local paper The Hawthorne Republican, and in those several minutes he learns more about his father than he had in the previous four decades. Especially once the action hits Hawthorne, the ghosts of the past are felt in every shot. There is much talk about a time in which Woody owned a successful business with his friend and had two women fighting over his affections, but all that activity is now replaced by a discomforting and depressing stillness. Where once there was energy and youth, now there is decay.

All of this undersells just how bitingly funny Nebraska is, and never more so than when Squibb’s gloriously unfiltered wife comes onto the scene and promptly hurls insults left and right. Another one of the best scenes comes when the family takes a trip to a Hawthorne cemetery, and she helpfully goes down the line of tombstones and describes her experiences with each of the deceased. It’s an alternately touching and uproarious scene, helped by her character’s refusal to play by the usual rules when talking about the dead. But once again, it is a scene that reflects on Woody’s past and all of the alternate ways his life could have played out.

With this film, Payne has created a lived-in world that feels wholly realized. Shooting on location is a large part of what makes it work, of course, but everything down to each character’s wardrobe feels absolutely perfect. And then there is Dern’s wonderfully spacey performance as Woody; a man who floats in and out of his environment seemingly at will. One moment he’s having a perfectly coherent conversation, the next he’s staring into the middle distance and has to be woken from his daze. In general, he seems to be tired of the world around him, and this journey to retrieve the phony $1 million is the only thing that gives his life any purpose. He’s perfectly happy being a sad, drunk old man. But when he goes out, he wants to make sure that his life was worth something.

Grade: A