br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 10 p.m. I ran my husband Charles one of the best 21st century movies I’ve seen in quite a while: Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, an extraordinary 2013 film starring Bruce Dern as Woody Grant, a curmudgeonly old man who’s convinced he’s won $1 million in a magazine sweepstakes but only if he can get from his home in Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim the prize in person. Woody’s adult son David (Will Forte, a nice-looking heavy-set man who’s easy enough on the eyes without being disconcertingly sexy) reads the letter dad got from the company and figures it out immediately. It’s a scam, of course, a come-on to get him to buy magazine subscriptions and of course it doesn’t actually guarantee its recipient a $1 million prize. But try to explain that to Woody! David takes an unauthorized leave of absence from his job (as home electronics salesman for the local Best Buy) to drive his father clear across the country to Lincoln. David takes his father on this quixotic quest partially to relieve the boredom of his own life – the woman he’s been living with for two years has suddenly left him, apparently because he wouldn’t actually marry her – and partly in hopes that en route with his dad he’ll somehow be able to explain it to him that he is not an actual millionaire.
On the way they stop for a brief visit to Mount Rushmore – Woody is unimpressed and he says it looks unfinished, which it is. As I wrote in a 2013 review of a PBS documentary on Mount Rushmore, “[I]n 1935 the South Dakota Senator Peter Norbeck, [Mount Rushmore artist Gutzon] Borglum’s principal backer for the project in Washington, D.C., got sick with cancer and the project finally expired in 1941 when the U.S. entered World War II. Borglum died in April 1941 but work continued for a few more months under his son Lincoln’s direction. [S]o what you see when you go to Mount Rushmore today is four giant faces and a huge pile of rubble beneath them.” More importantly, on their way to Lincoln they stop in Hawthorne, Nebraska – a town I hadn’t known the existence of until I saw this movie. The only city or community I knew of in the U.S. named Hawthorne was the one in southern California, where the Beach Boys were from, but according to the Roadside Thoughts Web site (https://roadsidethoughts.com/ne/hawthorne-xx-lancaster-profile.htm) there are a total of 32 towns named Hawthorne in the U.,S. and Canada; besides the ones in California and Nebraska there are Hawthornes in Connecticut, Florida (2), Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland (2), Michigan, Mississippi (2), Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Nova Scotia, Ontario (3), Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas (2), Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Apparently the Grant family actually grew up in Hawthorne, Nebraska and a lot of their relatives, friends and acquaintances are still there. Among them is a man named Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) who claims Woody owes him $10,000 – while Woody remembers him mainly as a man who “borrowed” his air compressor 40 years before and never returned it. Woody’s relatives, including his sister Martha (Mary Louise Wilson) and brother Ray (Rance Howard), also demand money from him, claiming he owes them for all the times he got drunk and they had to bail him out either financially or literally. (Woody is one of those annoying men who keeps denying that he’s an alcoholic even though he quite obviously is one.) At one point David takes Woody to a local cemetery with his wife (David’s mom) Kate (June Squibb) and David’s older brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), who’s become a substitute anchor on a local Billings news show (at one point he gets into a bar fight ahd pleads with his opponents not to hit him in the face because the bruises would show on TV) to the local cemetery. In the film’s most audacious scene, Kate spots the tombstone of one of her old boyfriends, lifts her skirts (Payne wisely keeps the camera behind her but we get the idea of what’s going on) and says, “You see what you could have had?” (The film got an “R” rating but the only reason given was “some language” – to wit, a couple of “fucks” and a few “shits” and “bullshits.”)
Ed Pegram, who used to own the local garage as Woody’s business partner until he sold it (and it’s now owned by Hispanic people, which we “get” by hearing them speak to each other in Spanish), gets so desperate for the money that he gets two friends of his to mug Woody for the sweepstakes money – and when he reads it he realizes it’s a scam and reads it openly in a local bar (a lot of this movie takes place in local bars, including one that has a karaoke machine on which one of the characters sings Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” though otherwise all the songs heard in the film are country) as a form of ridicule. The film ends with Woody and David showing up at the Lincoln office of the company that sent it, and a sympathetic young woman reviews it, punches a few numbers on her computer, tells Woody and David it’s not a winning number, and David asks her if this happens often. She says yes, and adds, “I hope you folks didn’t come too far.” When David says, “Montana,” she looks sorry for them even though there’s nothing she could do to help. (It occurred to me that had this film been made in the 1930’s, the million-dollar prize would have been real.) The film has a happy ending of sorts, though, as David sells his car to a local used-car dealer and buys a truck – Woody had said that the first thing he intended to do with his million dollars was buy a truck, even though David pointed out he couldn’t do anything with it since he lost his driver’s license over a decade before (presumably due to drunk driving) – and even puts it in his dad’s name and lets him drive it for a few blocks once they get back home to Billings.
I loved Nebraska from start to finish, and I suspect it was a particularly good film to be watching on the eve of Charles’s 60th and my 69th birthdays. It’s a film with special appeal to folks our age who are looking back at their lives with a sense of regret that we accomplished so little with them. Most of the characters, especially the others Woody’s age, are living in the past hand harboring resentments as well as regrets. Though Alexander Payne didn’t write the script for Nebraska – Bob Nelson did – it’s very much in Payne’s wheelbase; like his most famous film, Sideways (also a road-trip movie, which follows a journey of wine collectors across country in search of exciting new vintages), it’s a marvelous film in its quiet, subtle way. Oddly, Charles didn’t like it as well as I did; he thought it seemed padded and quoted back to me a lot of the things I’ve said over the years about “narrative economy” and how filmmakers in the 1930’s could tell much longer and more complicated stories in far shorter running times than directors today. That wasn’t a problem I had with Mebraska, though, and I suspect it’s because Payne and Nelson used a relatively slow pace to get us into the headspace of their characters and bring them to life in all th eir faults and frailties as well as their good sides. I think Nebraska is a beautiful film, and Payne shot it in black-and-white to give it a warm, nostalgic glow without drowning us in color. Nebraska is a film that evokes the best of classic films while still using the greater sexual and social freedom avaliable to filmmakers today, and I think it definitely belongs on any list of underrated films by major directors. Since Mebraska Payne has made only one more feature, Downsizing, set in a dystopian future in which people are encouraged literally to “downsize,” to shrink themselves and live in miniature worlds so they don’t use as many resources to survive.
