In Payne’s vision, the underbelly of America’s heartland is populated by an appalling cast of characters motivated primarily by old grudges, resentments and greed – though only Woody’s one-time business partner, Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), quite rises (or sinks) to a level that could be called villainy. Woody’s hostile, foul-mouthed wife Kate, hilariously played by June Squibb, is described by the actress as a woman who “has no filter. Absolutely whatever she thinks comes out of her mouth.”
The middle act of the movie is set within an ad hoc family reunion in Woody’s small Nebraska hometown, precipitated by his cross-country odyssey to claim the fortune of his fantasies, and they’re a miserable bunch indeed. The scenes of a listless crowd of Grant uncles and cousins slumped in front of a football game on TV while their womenfolk trade malicious gossip in the kitchen are enough to make you want to forswear your American citizenship.
But Nebraska is by no means just a diatribe against the banality of our culture and the futility of our hopes and dreams. It’s extremely funny, for one thing – even if much of the humor is at the expense of a vexingly stubborn, dotty old codger. And the emotional crux of the narrative, blossoming slowly out of David’s exasperation with his Dad’s disconnect from reality, is surprisingly tender.
Shot entirely in black-and-white, Nebraska is also worth seeing just for its sublime, evocative cinematography, courtesy of Phedon Papamichael. Though their human population is depicted as nearly uniformly unsightly, the wintry landscapes, depopulated small towns and crumbling farmsteads of America’s High Plains and Midwest are captured here in all their bleak beauty – as if lensed by an Ansel Adams raised in Lake Wobegon, who’d had all ambition of visiting exotic places like Yosemite drummed out of him at an early age. America would be an exquisite place, the movie seems to tell us, if only it didn’t have all these mean-spirited Americans living in it.
At heart the movie is a classic father/son bonding story. When we look at his grasping, blaming forebears, it’s hard to imagine from whom David inherited the capacity to indulge his father’s crazy whim by driving him from their home in Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska. But because that bit of compassion is in him, however inexplicably, the movie can end on a note of hope and some small-scale triumph over the pettiness of a family defeated by the ravages of time and the decline of the Midwest’s farming economy.
Though best-known as a comic from his work on Saturday Night Live, MacGruber and 30 Rock, Forte does a fine job of holding up his end as the long-suffering son who, deep down, truly loves his old man (and learns a whole lot more about his past), even while Woody is making him tear his hair out. But it’s Bruce Dern – incandescent in his senile bafflement and unstoppable in his quixotic quest for enough prize money to buy a truck that he’s no longer allowed to drive – who carries this show on his drooping shoulders as Woody shuffles determinedly along American’s gray highways. It’s a performance to cap a long career proudly, and one not to be missed.
