Review #814: 'Nebraska' (2013)

After 2011's slow-moving but well-acted The Descendants, writer/director Alexander Payne (here only on directorial duties) returns to the road-movie formula that served him so well in his greatest film, 2004's Sideways. When we first meet Nebraska's grizzled and hunched hero, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), he is plodding along a snow-laden road, wandering without any sense of direction. He is picked up by the police and taken back to his iron-fisted wife Kate (June Squibb), who longs to put this 80-plus year old man, teetering dangerously on the cusp of dementia, in a home.

His son, David (Will Forte), is a passive young man who is unhappy in his salesman job and has recently separated from his girlfriend. He learns from his mother that his father was on his way to Lincoln, Nebraska (Woody lives in Montana) to pick up a million dollars he believes he has won in a junk mail sales scam. Where most people would throw it away without thinking twice, this grey-haired old coot believes that they can't say it if it isn't true. In his stubbornness, Woody convinces David to drive him to Lincoln, and David, having lived most of his life in the shadow of his small-town news anchor brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), sees a chance to spend some time with the father he doesn't really know.

Like most Payne efforts, Nebraska is low on plot but high on humanity. After a long career playing eccentrics and loons, Dern gives a highly understated performance, which is without a doubt the best work he has ever done. More than just a poor old man to feel sorry for, Dern brings a history to the eyes of his character, a man who has seen his life come and go without really realising it. In one extremely touching scene, David questions his father about why he and his mother got married. Woody says "I figured, what the hell," and when David asks him if he was ever sorry he married her, he replies "all the time." It's a desperately sad and honest portrayal of a man helpless in his regret.

Yet, like most of Payne's films, Nebraska is also very funny. As Woody becomes a local celebrity in Lincoln, his home town, when knowledge of his 'wealth' spreads, Woody finds old friends (such as Stacy Keach's Ed) and half-forgotten family coming out of the woodwork looking for a handout or what they believe is owed to them. This is when Kate turns up, a small but feisty woman, prone to telling her sons about how she was the subject of many a groping hand in her youth, much to David and Ross's disgust. Squibb is magnificent, and injects energy into the film when it starts to need it. Nebraska is Payne's most mature film to date, gorgeously filmed, expertly performed, and surely now one of the definitive films about reaching the end of your path.


Directed by: Alexander Payne
Starring: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Bob Odenkirk, Stacy Keach
Country: USA

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie