Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Alexander Payne has gradually become the new "it" director - one which critics of all different stripes have rallied behind.  My feelings about him are a bit more mixed.  I haven't seen all of his movies, but I certainly like all of those that I have seen well enough.  They're beautifully shot, well-plotted, and elicit great performances from their casts.  My problem with Payne is that I never quite connect with his characters in the way that he wants me to.

Take his latest film, Nebraska, which is about an old man, one who embodies the word "cantankerous," and a trip he takes with his son to collect upon an imaginary lottery winning.  Along the way, he is forced into an impromptu reunion with his extended family in the titular state.  The film is quite beautiful, with its crisp black-and-white landscape shots and nouveau-folk score*.  And Bruce Dern and Will Forte give great performances.  Like Emmanuelle Riva in Amour - and more famously, but in an example I haven't seen, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man - Bruce Dern's performance is a bit over-hyped simply because his character lies on the extreme of human experience.  Forte is the real lead here.  But both he and Dern do a great job.

There is a great ambiguity about whether Dern's character really believes the fiction - if you watch his expression when his wife is excoriating him, it seems clear that he knows full well what's going on.  I guess this is the aspect of Nebraska that I relate to the most; my limited conversations with my grandfather reveal that he can at times be extremely lucid, with a good memory, but there are often slips that make one question whether he isn't making things up.

In any case, what I've mentioned so far makes up the reason that Nebraska is my favorite Payne film.  But there's a lot I find unsatifying about it as well.  Certainly, I applaud the decision to cast Forte, but his character as written seems so unnatural to his environment that I immediately have trouble believing him.  (Similarly, I could never quite buy Clooney's character in The Descendants, or Giamatti's in Sideways.) 

I know there's a good reason for this:  Payne himself is a Nebraska native who doesn't fit the mold.  Yet so much of the humor of the film comes from contrasting Forte with his lethargic, simpleton family members, and that contast seems entirely artificial.  I too am a small-town kid trying to make it in the city, and like Forte's character I can't always relate to my family, yet I can still see the similarities.

*The score was actually composed by a member of Tin Hat (formerly Tin Hat Trio), a fact that I could recognize instantly.  It's excellent stuff and it fits the movie perfectly, although it's always distracting when you have a personal, separate attachment to a film's music.