About Schmidt (2002)
Directed by Alexander Payne
A recently retired man embarks on a journey to his estranged daughter's wedding, only to discover more about himself and life than he ever expected.
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What critics compared About Schmidt to
That "Election" reference leads to another observation, and that is the many parallels between "Up in the Air" and "Election's" writer/director Alexander Payne's "About Schmidt."
A scenario reminiscent of Alexander Payne's About Schmidt, it's as glib and false as Bingham's spiel to stunned, newly canned ex-employees.
So he set his aim higher, wanting to make a film with the kind of complex, seriocomic humanity he admired in Billy Wilder, Hal Ashby, James L. Brooks, and the contemporary director he most reveres, Alexander Payne ( Sideways , About Schmidt , Election ).
Rolfe Kent (ah, the Alexander Payne connection!—for his scores on Sideways, About Schmidt, Election, and Citizen Ruth) does a masterfully complimentary score, with additional songs picked by music supervisor Randall Poster including Crosby, Stills & Nash and Charles Atlas.
His six previous films (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska) center around characters at a crossroads, American dreamers grabbing at intangibles.
And, although the sci-fi trappings of Downsizing make it seem like a big departure from Payne's previous work — The Descendants, Sideways, About Schmidt — it is the same in important ways.
Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska are all, in some respects, about mediocre men reaching an impasse…
Payne famously kept Jack Nicholson within bounds for his 2002 comedy About Schmidt, but Waltz has not been so amenable.
In keeping with Payne’s recent penchant for struggling men trying to navigate their way through their ordinary existence — as seen in About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska — Downsizing spends the bulk of its time with Paul Safranek (Matt Damon).
“Downsizing” operates from the recognizably humane level of such films as “Nebraska,” “Sideways” and “About Schmidt.”
His sophomore effort, “Election,” and third film, “About Schmidt,” showed that the writer/director is far more than a one-shot wonder.
Alexander Payne, the director of Citizen Ruth, Election, and About Schmidt, has returned with his best film to date, Sideways, a brilliant revival of that most disreputable of genres, the buddy movie.
In his last cinematic journey, About Schmidt , Payne took us across a middle America that wasn't too far from his home of Nebraska.
I wasn't a fan of his previous film, About Schmidt, which seemed too consciously tailored as a Jack Nicholson bid for indie cred.
While his previous film, About Schmidt, had humorous elements, this on-the-road jaunt is a laugh riot.
His third film, 2002's About Schmidt, was a great story that proved you can start over at any age, and also featured yet another landmark performance from Jack Nicholson, again reinventing himself in the role.
That these two eventually come to a sort of mutual understanding is not surprising. It's that Payne, an ace, dry wit satirist with prickly sensibilities (see "Election" or "About Schmidt"), never chases the hug in doing so.
In About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004) and Nebraska (2013), the central characters are all people who have strictly regimented themselves to a certain way of thinking and being. What begins to change them? Being on the open road.
The Intern doesn’t have the sophistication or wit of an About Schmidt , but it shares with that Alexander Payne comedy-drama an unspoken acknowledgement that its senior-citizen character has more years behind him than ahead, a realization that subtly colors everything Ben does in the film.
Surely, it’s a movie like “About Schmidt” about a senior citizen looking for a life after his marriage, but the movie is less about the meaningless of life, and more about how character Ben doesn’t have it so bad.
The anti-About Schmidt, The Intern is the boomer daydream of a 66-year-old filmmaker, which definitely feels out of step with the times but maybe not as much as the movie's gender imbalances (this thing is a sausage-fest) and hopeless whiteness.
He begins sending a flurry of letters to an unlikely recipient — it's a narrative device that was also seen in About Schmidt, only here the sender actually gets to meet the person receiving his missives.
“For some reason everything has become a metaphor,” he writes in one of the letters of general grievance to a vending machine customer complaints department which, similarly to About Schmidt, double as a voice over.
It’s essentially a mash-up of Hesher, About Schmidt, and Office Space, that doesn’t have much to say that those movies didn’t say already.
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Female characters are either thrown off trains, cast aside or left floundering, while an underused Stephen Fry offers the most disturbing nude scene since Kathy Bates headed for the hot tub in About Schmidt.
Senior citizen and recent widower Walt, a Korean War vet and retired auto worker who persists in living in his humble bungalow long after the neighborhood has gone downhill, is living out what smells like another About Schmidt scenario — except that The Man with No Name takes the theme of not going gently into that good night and gives it a violent Eastwood-ian spin it doesn't really deserve.
He visits known area sex offenders and finds something gruesome at the home of an alcoholic priest (Len Cariou, "About Schmidt").