ABOUT SCHMIDT review

God I love THE APARTMENT. Yeah, that 1960 film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacClaine. That movie doesn’t play fair at all. First it feels that it wants to be a situational comedy. There’s a lightness to it at the beginning. It introduces the situation, here’s this upwardly mobile wannabe executive type, that has turned his convenient apartment into a location for those carnal shindigs for his higher ups. Quickly we get the idea that this is a character that is very lonely. He doesn’t have real friends, but tons of acquaintances. He has no love in his life, and frankly it doesn’t seem entirely likely as well. What a great idea for a sitcom, right?

Well, right after things are set up, we discover that while this film is funny, reality… that cold bitter mean and spiteful thing that tears men and women apart equally. We are soon shown that these characters are not the crepe paper of sitcoms, but human beings… nuanced, quirky, feeling deep feelings of regret, loss… They have secret crushes, loves and when these thing turn bitter - suicide is there. Life in this film is every bit as precious and fragile as it is here. Through this film, you see everybody put through the ringer. The result is classic. It is a story about reality – with that quirky slightly off angled knowing wink that… yup, this is life as we know it.

I adore the end of THE APARTMENT.

In a strange way, I had the rather odd notion while watching ABOUT SCHMIDT today that I was watching a sequel to THE APARTMENT. Oh, the Apartment wasn’t there anymore. In fact neither was New York. Jack Lemmon’s Calvin Clifford was being called Warren Schmidt and had been recast with Jack Nicholson. The luminescent Fran Kubelik had become cold and distant, losing her beauty and her figure. The promise at the end of THE APARTMENT was forgotten, as promises of youth are often discarded.

Why did I see this? Well early in the film, Warren Schmidt tells us that this isn’t how it was supposed to be. He had had big plans for Warren Schmidt. He’d innovate, form a company, rule New York as a financial wizard that all would be in awe of. However, when he met his Helen, he sought security… safety… So the dreamer checked that dream for a 9 to 5, heavy over-time, heavy travel position as an account vice president at the fine and out-standing Woodmen Insurance Company.

We’re introduced to Schmidt in an empty boxed up office watching the final seconds of his job tick away. He attends his retirement party and really doesn’t care about any of the speeches, the congratulations and the sincere endorsements by friends and his replacement – well they all seem a bit Memorex, like he’s heard these speeches for others before him. He needs to go sneak a drink.

His wife had long been neglected, seemingly sacrificing her own passion for stability. She didn’t so much have a husband as she had a roommate. She kept her life busy with her child, now off in Denver set to get married, along with elaborate unappreciated dinners, her precious Hummel and Teddy Bears and Thimble collections. We’re not given the focus on her hopes and dreams that we get from Warren, but I get the idea that through her entire marriage, she held tight to the dream that in retirement, she’ll finally leave the house with her husband and have adventures in their astonishingly plush RV. It’s a little dream, but to a house wife that never really has been shown anything, it is as big as her dreams were allowed to get.

Warren’s life is a deeply sad affair. He lies not only to his wife about little things, but to himself and his foster child he’s sponsoring in Africa named Ndugu. What? How’d that happen?

In the short days after his retirement he finds himself staring at the television set in his height of comfort and style recliner, mindless, unfocused… flipping channels. You know that useless drivel hours of television where you flip and see horrors and atrocities like Phyllis Diller, Jim Nabors, thrusting aerobicized bodies, cooking shows and yes… those sad eyes of a starving child in Africa. Well at that moment, when choosing between those images, those choices, those real human eyes staring out from his screen in desperation… in need… They reached Warren Schmidt and they touched something in the heart of this man that had exhausted a life of dealing with insurance and coverages. The $22 dollars a month, it is such a little thing really. Sure, why not?

Even watching how this is handled you see even this as an act of rebellion. He’s CHOOSING to do this on his own. Doesn’t call in his wife to discuss it. When the envelope comes with the picture of “his child” – NDUGU – he stares at it, makes out his check, reads the handbook for what he’s doing for this child. Oh, and he’s supposed to write a personal letter to this child in Africa. These letters are the gateway into who Schmidt is in this film.

He doesn’t write these letters to a child, but rather to someone that he believes culturally understands the nuances of his own life. This is someone that will listen and consider, he feels. Here in these letters he comes the closest to telling his story as he sees it… not quite. Even here he lies a little. Not ever really coming clean. Always slightly guarded, but it is with NDUGU that he shares the most. There’s something crazed and sad and real about these letters to NDUGU. Schmidt is a bit like Kevin McCarthy running down that black & white highway proclaiming that “They” are here already, as if anyone really cared about “They.”

Here, he admits how he truly feels about his ‘dear’ wife. He’s tired of her, those endearing quirks she used to have, are now the things of disdain. No longer is she the woman he thought he married, she’s been replaced by an old woman, doing old woman things and not at all the dream of the woman he had once loved. This first letter is a testament to just how tired, Schmidt is about Schmidt. How his life has become this endless cycle of meaningless activities. He cherishes the idea of his daughter, but as we learn, this is more of an ideal than a reality. She’s precious in the way that we all love our families and children, but he doesn’t really know her. Watch that introductory series of flashes to his Jeannie. Helen’s hands washing her, eyes from an auditorium watching her play in Band, a view from a car of her fiancé. These are not intimate moments, they are really attended moments where, He’s The Dad.

When Warren steps out to mail his first letter and check to NDUGU he gets himself a BLIZZARD at Dairy Queen, forbidden pleasure. As he left the house his “dear wife” Helen is on her hands and knees vacuuming some powder off the floor and tells him to not “dillydally.” When he returns, well… His wife is dead. Suddenly he’s on his own.

All that I’ve written is the set-up for the film. The opening 30 minutes or so. This tells you a bit about Schmidt. In those opening 30 minutes he learns that his last years on Earth will most likely be spent alone. In the remaining time, we find him trying to change things for his daughter. To keep her from making the type of mistake that he and his wife had made. To keep her options open. She doesn’t want him around. You can’t really help those that are not open to listening. Schmidt ultimately learns about himself that he is, in all ways a failure in life. There is nothing that he has a passion for. Nobody truly loves him or cares about him. Ultimately the work he dedicated his life to was tossed the moment he left the building.

About Schmidt… He’s more or less a character of indecisive hesitancy. Locked off from the world, hidden behind a well mannered and gentlemanly set of behaviors. He can do the right thing, well at least what others perceive as the right thing. He can stand up and make everyone a bit happier for having spoken… except himself.

Nicholson proves in this film why he is the very best actor of his generation. This is a brave, fearless role. Anytime you think you’re about to see JACK NICHOLSON barrel onto the screen, he crawls back into that RV of his, and heads out. He’s a man at that point in his life where he realizes that he will indeed die alone. That ultimately there is no one there for him. The comforts have past him. The days of dating gone. He wouldn’t know how to start over. His life is simply ebbing away without any real meaning or purpose.

Is that how we leave him? See the film. There is more to it than that, but not much more. The film is fiercely funny, sad and morose. The film will ask you the question about dying alone and having accomplished nothing with your life. It’ll make you laugh at the questions, through the tears that is.

Ultimately we all think about dying alone. We all also dream of dying in that wonderful concept of the loving extended family gathered around us as we gently go, watching people genuinely affected by our passing.

Have any of us really touched and made peoples’ lives the better for our existing to touch them?

Nicholson is as good as he’s ever been in his career. He’s completely realized this character, a restrained and paced man, so you know this isn’t Jack playing the arched eyebrows and wolfish grin. He isn’t sticking to the Jack-crutches, this is Jack playing a role that very much, 3 years ago would have been played by Jack Lemmon. And that would have been a shame. I love Jack Lemmon, but watching Nicholson play with this role, that’s something that I haven’t seen before, and I’m quite taken with it.

Jack deserves any awards he may be nominated for or suggested for with this performance. It really is quite spectacular in its own quiet sort of way.

While we learn that Schmidt is very much alone, this film also illustrates why he’s alone with a cornucopia of characters that would drive anyone to a life of solitude.

Warren’s precious Jeannie – well she’s a mother’s daughter, and I got the impression that Jeannie heard hours upon hours of her mother griping and being miserable about Warren. She’s bitter that he never really took an interest in her life. Honestly, she isn’t a very bright bulb. She’s quite doughty and common. The family she is marrying into reminds instantly of the in-laws that have their own pleasantly argumentative dependably loathsome behaviors and delusions. All quite real. Each of these characters ring true and I can actually point out each one of them in my own life. It really is quite frightening.

Now you might be wondering why I see this as a companion piece for THE APARTMENT, after all that film ended on such an up note, and this is such a sad sad tale of disappointment and unrealized dreams.

Well, maybe because right now in my life I don’t believe in happy endings, but in happy times. Because I don’t believe my best intentions are enough, and the impact of my actions may be out of my control. Because there’s that part of me that knows I’ll die alone and that I seriously wonder if anything in this life will ever mean as much to me as a few months I had this year. I know that doesn’t sound like the typically chipper Harry, but hell, we all have our moments of self-flagellating and while things are not all bleak and dark for me at the moment, and I am a romantic that wants to believe in happily ever after, I’m also a DR ZHIVAGO man. I see that film as being truer than the Disney and Happy Hollywood horseshit I see in the bell-ringing conclusion of most films. This film reminds a bit of films like ULEE’S GOLD and THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN. There’s a tiredness here. There is an exhaustion.

I love THE APARTMENT. It makes me happy, makes me believe in things working out, but when the movie is over and the lights go dark… I think ABOUT SCHMIDT.

There’s a real half-empty feel to this movie. A bit of a cure for all those radiant smiles and upbeats we see in movies. All stories don’t end happily, even our own. It’s nice to see movies that remind us about the bitter pill, that way we’re not afraid to swallow it and move on should the time arrive.

Alexander Payne is another of those filmmakers that I’m just delighted to see evolve today. Right now I find the world around me profoundly sad and the outlook bleak, but I laugh at it all like Crom in his mountain. And Payne does as well. He’s focused on details and faces that are often left on the cutting room floors of the average filmmaker, and Alexander is anything, but average. He’s an exceptional filmmaker with the ability to make me howl in laughter and then without warning… he’ll shiv ya and twist, then make jest at your seeping wound. Payne is so unflinchingly sure of his hand with this film that he’ll just throw something at you that you never see coming. It'll could make you laugh or cry or nod your head in agreement. He's made a film with a lot of truth to it. And Nicholson reminds us all why he's Jack!