I don’t know how Nebraskans will feel about Alexander Payne‘s new movie, Nebraska but for one who has driven across its wide, austere plains many times, it catches first of all the stretch and sweep of sky and earth, the piling up of clouds, the remote sentinels of silo and tower marking the edge of the world.  All shot in black and white, and perfect at that. Color would have turned the story into something completely different

The panorama of visuals is right for catching and displaying the lives being shown, a man as determined as Don Quixote to reach a dream, to have one nice thing before he dies,  to make up for not having anything to pass on to his kids.  Watching him, with concern or with their own greed, is the family from which he came, and escaped.

Bruce Dern, as everyone has said, is perfect as Woody Grant.  It is as if he had been found on skid-row, anywhere, and plopped into the movie. His shambling, unsteady walk, his thinning ragged flag of hair, his eyes, jumping from vacant to present never suggest an actor at work but a man in trouble.

The old man has received an elaborate certificate assuring him that he has won one million dollars.  At the edge of dementia he can do no other than believe it is true and sets out to walk from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska –about 1,000 miles.  After being hauled in by a friendly highway patrol man and picked up by his gentle youngest son, David [Will Forte], he bats aside protestations of his buzz-saw wife, Kate [June Squibb] and the more sympathetic David and sets out walking again.  David reluctantly agrees to drive him to Lincoln and takes a few days off his low-wage job in a music equipment store.

They break the trip in Hawthorn [actually Norfolk, NE], the town Woody is from.  A Sunday gathering of his brothers and wives is organized, but not before Woody, forever assuring everyone that he doesn’t drink anymore,  “drinking beer isn’t drinking” heads for the local bars and find his former partner and other friends, letting them know he is a millionaire and on the way to get the money.  Of course money comes with problems, first in line all the memories of debts he has never repaid.

Along with claims of money owed come stories sweet young David has never heard, nor wants to hear: how his mother was the object of every man’s sexual attention, how his father was fooling around with a “half-breed” and had the informant not intervened David would likely never have been born.  He hears of his father’s being wounded in the Korean war — never spoken of, natch– and his extreme generosity as a young man, likely leading to some of his economic problems.

Kate, wife and mother, after showing herself as a likely candidate for having helped create the dazed, stubborn,  obtuse Woody, redeems herself by fiercely defending him as the vultures come in for landings. David’s older brother, Ross [Bob Odenkirk], arrives and the two boys throw together a plan to liberate an old compressor their father has long claimed was stolen by his partner.  Plan goes awry, of course. The dialogue of confusion between father and sons that follows is a minor gem.

While not a film of black-humor, exactly, it’s as dark gray as the Nebraska skies.  We find ourselves laughing at a strange behaviors and events which, if told differently, we’d find not funny at all.  The Sunday reunion of brothers who have not seen each other in decades is mostly a silent sharing of the Detroit-Chicago football game on TV.  Questions and answers are passed between long silences and with great effort.  Two cousins, out of work  and one doing  community service for a rape [“Not a rape!” says his mother, “a sexual offense!”] think it the height of hilarity that David took so long to drive from Billings.  All they have to do is look at each other to crack up again.

As Ross and their Mother head back to Billings, David takes his father, still not convinced he is being duped, despite the raucous laughter of his old friends having seen the certificate, on to Lincoln.  There, in the minuscule office of the magazine marketing firm, he finally accepts the truth. We’d call him broken if he were not so broken already.  David, in a fine understated sequence finds a way to help the old man retain of shred of dignity as they drive home through Hawthorne. 

For some the pacing will be too slow, for others a right reflection of the story being told and the people composing it.  These men talk slow, for pete’s sake! Life is slow.  This is not the Nebraska of the many family farms and bustling down towns.  Windows are boarded up; people have moved on. The pace and the photography seem to have grown out of  the story itself.

The sound track, [credits here] while not from Springsteen’s 1982 album of the same name, has some of the same subdued sensibility, especially in the mourning violin that keeps reappearing and the jazz infused guitar, much of it composed and played by Mark Orton.  Very good stuff.

My one wish is that David/Will Forte [of SNL origins] had been slightly more camera friendly.  Particularly in the opening sections he seems ill at ease, tentative, perhaps not ready to step out of his comedic background.  In the end, his character grew on me, but somehow I felt a little salt and pepper would have helped.

Some of the actors, a waitress, one of the two cousins, were cast from locals, not professionals.  They did an admirable job.  It turns out that Angela McEwen, with a nice small bit as Hawthorne’s newspaper publisher, is an acquaintance of mine who I knew only as a translator from Spanish.  She is perfect with the big bound archival newspapers showing David news of his Korean war father.

Payne calls it a ‘love letter to Nebraska.’ I don’t know.  I suppose. It’s a look a family dysfunction and a land that has shriveled much like Woody and the others.  Yet not an unkind look.  Honest, shall we say.  Tender.  Perfectly encapsulated in the long puzzled, sorrowful look of an old girlfriend [Angela McEwan] as Woody makes his final drive through town.   There was a once and this is now.

Love letter maybe, but you don’t write letters unless you’re gone.