Nebraska finds director Alexander Payne returning to his home state. The Omaha native has been taking a bit of a cinematic vacation from Nebraska, documenting with the same eye for detail the lives of people from the more glamorous locales of California, Paris and Hawaii. But the Midwest is where much of the director’s earthy sense of humor springs, and his return finds him delivering a film that feels much less flashy than his recent efforts, but ultimately more true. Nebraska is a small story told with such familiarity that it’s impossible not to get drawn in. It catches you in its rhythms, integrating the audience in its understated rhythms.
Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) believes that he’s just won a million dollars. He hasn’t, really, but this doesn’t stop him from wanting to travel to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim his prize. Sensing that nothing will convince him to drop the matter, his son David (Will Forte) decides to bring him there. They travel from Montana to Nebraska, stopping on the way the Lincoln to visit Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne. There, they meet up with relatives and people from Woody’s past. Word soon gets out that Woody has won a million dollars, giving both father and son a lot of unwanted attention.
The trip to Hawthorne reveals to David much of his father’s history. In almost any other movie, this would be an uplifting journey, one where the son learns that his father is actually some sort of hero and comes to admire him. But this film has a penchant for cruelty, and isn’t about to give any of its characters an easy sense of triumph. David’s journey of discovery here only brings about a greater sense of loss. It is a history of practical choices, long divorced from the American dream. It only leads to a present filled with confusion, where a piece of junk mail becomes misinterpreted as a final chance of making it big.
It’s a bleak story, perfectly depicted in stark black-and-white. But the bleakness only makes the rare of moments of true compassion seem all the more wonderful. The joys of this film are subdued: small gestures of human kindness that manage to shine in the darkness; the kind that you might actually see in everyday life. The film finds genuine pleasure in the unremarkable, its frames filled with lived-in details of mundane lives. These don’t feel like characters from movies. They feel like genuine small town folk, just trying to make it to the next day.
Key to all this is Bruce Dern. The role was reportedly first offered to Gene Hackman. It’s hard to imagine such a showy actor pulling off this character. Dern underplays everything, his character’s entire history conveyed in grunts and distant stares. It is as perfect a performance as I can imagine. He is matched well by a similarly understated group of actors. Will Forte’s everyman charms serve him well as the movie’s voice of reason. Jane Squibb and Stacy Keach come off as extremely natural, even as the film pushes them to more out there behavior.
Nebraska is a story of going home, no matter where you’re from. It is a story that goes beyond locale. Nebraska here stands for every hometown, every trace of one’s past that you’ve tried to leave behind. It is the place where people once dreamed, and where those dreams ultimately got left behind. It is a film that confronts the harsh reality of nostalgia, and takes away the triumph of fantasy. And in the end, it champions the kindness that can still exist despite the bleakness of the world, finding the joy in the smallest of victories.
My Rating:
