Nebraska takes the road well travelled

WOODY Grant is a grumpy old man, a stubborn 70-something who, as he gets older, is becoming more and more set in his ways.

On the road well travelled

WOODY Grant is a grumpy old man, a stubborn 70-something who, as he gets older, is becoming more and more set in his ways and a considerable trial to his long-suffering wife, Kate, and his two sons. We first meet Woody, unkempt and wild-looking, as he walks along beside a busy road in Billings, Montana, the town where he lives. Woody is played by Bruce Dern, one of the iconic American movie actors of the 1970s, and the film in which we meet him is Nebraska, the sixth feature made by the remarkably talented Alexander Payne.

The reason Woody is striding out along the road is that he wants to get to Lincoln, Nebraska, which is 1367km from Billings, roughly a 12 1/2-hour drive. The problem is, Woody is no longer licensed to drive and he can’t persuade any of his family members to take him. Kate (June Squibb) thinks he should be in a home because he’s losing his mind, and his sons, David (Will Forte) and Ross (Bob Odenkirk), don’t want to take him because they know he’s on a wild goose chase. Woody has become convinced that he has won a $1 million sweepstake and that he has to get to Lincoln to collect the prizemoney, and no one can convince him that the “notification” he received is worthless junk mail.

This being a Payne film, we can predict from the start that Woody will make the trip, that there will be plenty of detours, and that several lives will be changed as a result. Payne, a passionate lover of classic cinema, is drawn to the road movie genre, as films such as About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004) will attest; his previous film, The Descendants (2012), set in Hawaii, involved a shorter journey but similar explorations into the lives of friends and/or family.

Eventually it’s David, a middle-aged salesman living alone after his latest failed relationship, who reluctantly agrees to take the old man to collect his “prize”; after all, he hasn’t spent much time with his father in recent years and a long drive such as this should give them an opportunity to bond. It takes longer than David suspects because, as a result of a minor accident, Woody is hospitalised for a while, and then the pair detour to Hawthorne, Nebraska, the town where Woody grew up and where he still has family and friends. These include Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), Woody’s former business partner.

Payne’s affection for the films of another era can be detected in numerous ways. Nebraska is filmed in black and white, a process that not only evokes the films of the 40s but also lends a melancholy tone to the farmland and the small towns of Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska through which father and son travel. These once prosperous parts of the country now appear neglected and forlorn, and the people who still live there seem like relics of another time. Payne’s regular cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael, does a remarkable job with his perfectly lit and framed images.

There’s a more specific reference to another era. Bob Nelson’s original screenplay seems to be referencing Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), Preston Sturges’s bitter comedy in which a loser, whose name also is Woody, is welcomed back to his home town as a hero but is unable reveal that he was medically unfit for the armed forces and didn’t even leave the US. The difference here is that Dern’s Woody is even more of a naive innocent - he doesn’t know that he’s misleading the people of Hawthorne, many of whom would welcome a slice of the $1m he keeps claiming he’s on the road to collect.

Dern, in his best role since the 70s, is an utterly convincing Woody. Payne has admitted that he originally invited another, more celebrated, 70s figure, Gene Hackman, to play the role but Hackman, now retired, declined. Hackman would have been fine, but it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Dern playing this cranky old critter whose long-forgotten past gradually catches up with him. Forte is a perfect foil and Squibb, who briefly played Jack Nicholson’s wife in About Schmidt, brings a stoic toughness to the character of the woman who has lived with this man for most of her life and who knows the good and the bad about him intimately.

In Payne films, as in the films of Jean Renoir, there are no “goodies” or “baddies”; everyone has their reasons, and that makes his work distinctly different from most mainstream American films these days.

Nebraska (M)

4.5 stars

Limited release from Thursday