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About Schmidt (2002About Schmidt is an American film directed by Alexander Payne and starring Jack Nicholson as Warren Schmidt and Hope Davis as his daughter Jeannie. It is based on the 1996 novel of the same title by Louis Begley.

The film begins with the retirement of Schmidt from his position as an actuary in an insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska. Schmidt finds it hard to adjust to his new life and feels useless and impotent. One evening, he is detachedly watching a television advertisement about a foster program for African children. Images of suffering children play before him and something moves within him - perhaps the idea of youth, now lost to him - and he enters the sponsorship program and soon receives an information package with a photo of "his" foster child, a small Tanzanian boy named Ndugu, to whom he relates his life in self-centric letters.

The film is overcast and rather pessimistic from the beginning, Schmidt's doom sensed by the audience as he seems to 'sit down for the last time' in narrating his wasted life to Ndugu. However, the point is that there are great flashes of optimism, of hope for the beaten Schmidt that it may in fact not be too late. Interestingly, the film opens with a death and a funeral, and closes with a wedding. The paradox is that the funeral gives the audience a sense of hope and freedom for Schmidt, that he might regain a life - a passion, a curiosity about the world and a venturing into it, perhaps to see Tanzania and meet Ndugu (the audience hopes), whereas his ultimate chance to break with the humdrum routine of existence which is granted at the wedding is failed, and thus the wedding - an event usually associated with happiness and hope - is when the audience feels final pessimism for the lost and pathetic Schmidt.

Schmidt's life is neither pleasant nor interesting, beautiful nor passionate. He retires from a lifetime's work in an insurance company at an interchangeable retirement dinner at a cheap function centre with its usual plates of beef and boiled broccoli and predictable speeches, recognisable details reminiscent of such novels as by Sinclair Lewis. He doesn't know what to do with his days now that a lifetime's routine and conditioning is removed from his institutionalised existence and he visits his young successor, a version of whom he himself had been forty years earlier, who impatiently - though with a fake cheeriness - ushers him back out the door with an insincere "welcome back any time" and a handshake, and Schmidt leaves the building only to see the entire contents of his office and working life in the basement, set out for the garbage-collectors. Nothing remains as evidence of his thousands of days spent there.

Nor is there any warmth or engagement in his home life. He describes his longtime alienation from his frumpy and nagging wife, and the audience feels a combination of resentment and pity towards him for trapping himself and being trapped in such a life. However, his wife suddenly dies from a blood clot in her brain. His friends and his daughter Jeannie, from whom he rarely hears but who returns from Denver, briefly console him at a funeral ridden with insincere expressions of condolence and untruthful remarks about what a great woman she had been, with clicheed emotional reactions that contradict themselves through dirty arguments over money and meaningless trivialities such as cheap funeral caskets. Jeannie intends to marry Randall Hertzel (played by Dermot Mulroney), a union opposed by Schmidt, who feels that the dim-witted salesman is not up to any woman's standards, and is especially unsuited to his own daughter. Randall recommends the book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" by Harold Kushner to Schmidt and then tries to entice him into a pyramid scheme. The audience hopes Jeannie will not throw her life away as her father has, and wills Schmidt to 'save' his daughter, and hopes for their reconciliation. But this film is not a fairytale, though it uses humour and emotion brilliantly to keep optimism alive. It is utterly truthful, darkly and wearily honest, the story of a dead man who happens to still be alive, and the dead society in which he has died through passively going along its passages. After the couple returns to Denver, Colorado, Schmidt is again left alone.

His decay continues, weeks of no washing, of sleeping and waking in front of the television, of eating the entire contents of the kitchen, of trips outside with a coat over pyjamas. But hope flares again. He decides to take a journey in his new Winnebago to see his daughter and convince her not to marry. When he phones her to tell her he is coming a few weeks earlier than planned for the wedding, she meanly insists that he only arrive shortly before the wedding. The coldness of the relationships he has had with his empty and boring wife and daughter, both greedy, petty and materialistic women, is clear. The audience feels a mixure of sympathy for how they have treated Schmidt, ganging up on and using him, and of disrespect for his weakness at allowing himself to have been beaten down and used by them, but now feels hope for him, that he will show some backbone no matter how late in life he is. He is not completely blind to his daughter's stupidity - though he loves her deeply because of their kinship, because he needs connections and love - and, through knowing this, the audience feels optimistic for Schmidt.

Schmidt then decides to travel to places of his past instead. After a short journey punctuated by sad revelations (his childhood home, for example, has been replaced by a tire shop), Schmidt arrives in Denver shortly before his daughter's wedding. He meets her fiancé's appalling family and tries to dissuade her from the marriage, but she will not listen. She and her fiance say terrible things to one another and the family conversation and interaction is full of tension, depravity, criticism and ugly language, yet at the wedding is terribly and insincerely pleasant. The wedding features every cold cliche possible. Fights and divorce and a continuation of the class- and family-chain are clearly on the horizon of Jeannie. The audience wills Schmidt to stand up to it, to at least save his own dignity when he cannot save his daughter. But Schmidt cannot help himself giving into the chain of these sad lifetimes and, at the wedding when he stands to deliver a speech to the couple, it is his one chance at a last possibility of redemption, his last chance to follow his instincts that this marriage is terribly wrong, but he does not. It is the climax of the film. He gives in and delivers a weary speech, so identical to a million wedding-speeches before that the audience can nearly recite along with him, which is the intention.

It is the most tired, emotionless, cliche-filled, insincere speech possible, but no seems to notice, precisely because all these people are prisoners of this chain. Schmidt sees it, knows it, but has been part of it his whole life. He does not take this chance at redemption and, after the speech, retires to sickness at himself in the bathroom, a broken man. This is the tragedy of Schmidt. When he returns home, his narrative to Ndugu questions what he has possibly accomplished in his life, what he has achieved, or contributed, or what relationships he has formed; he knows there was nothing with his wife nor with his daughter. A decaying and broken man, he opens the door of his neglected and empty home and the audience recalls what he had said as he described being an actuary earlier in the film, about knowing that, given his life's circumstances of gender, age, widowhood, he will die within nine years. The audience knows he has come home to die, alone.

The one tiny gleam of sunlight is the continuing narration to Ndugu, the audience still wondering if, possibly, something is still going to happen to miraculously change Schmidt's life. A pile of mail is waiting for him inside the empty house. Wearily, but with a glimmer of hope that the audience feels, Schmidt opens a surprise letter from Tanzania. It is written by a nun who cares for Ndugu, and she writes briefly but warmly that the little boy cannot read nor write but enjoy's Schmidt's letters very much. A hand-drawn picture is enclosed, two smiling brown people in the blazing sun. Schmidt's eyes tear as he sits with his back to the grey Nebraska day, alone, high above the pale street. It is the closest relationship he has ever formed; a little boy he has never met, who does not know his face or his voice and cannot even read those letters with their human truth that had been voiced only once in this lifetime. The film ends.

is a slow, dark, heavy and very moving film; the introspective narrative and ordinariness of the character is an unusual role for Nicholson, whose performances in movies like are frequently 'over-the-top', earning him the reputation to play "manic weirdos". As the title suggests, the movie focuses almost entirely on Warren Schmidt, giving little attention to the deeper thoughts and feelings of the other characters. It does not need to. The audience can see enough of them to know how they are in their meaningless world where little remains after the day and after death, for they are a microcosm of a whole way of life. The film is About Schmidt, about the chance of this one man to possibly break from it, about how he does not. It is incredibly sad.

Schmidt is a complete no, like many of the other central characters of the film; he proves himself to be so at the wedding, when instead of doing what he knows to be right - and therefore acting in an ethical and moral manner - he deliberately lies. His self-destruction is complete. It may be argued that it is straightforward to the point of opening itself to the criticism of simplicity, but Nicholson's performance puts a straight face on what could be perceived as the movie's message of altruism. However, Schmidt is not altruistic. To be so, one must have guiding morals and principles and live by and act on them, and Schmidt does not. He is hollow, empty, passive - a no.

The movie has been rated R ("Restricted; Under 17 Requires Accompanying Parent or Adult Guardian") in the United States for some profanity and a brief sequence of nudity in a scene where Randall's sexually promiscuous mother Roberta (played by Kathy Bates, known for her lead role in ) tries to seduce Schmidt in a hot tub.

Jack Nicholson was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 2003 and Kathy Bates was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role but neither won. The film did receive the 2003 Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay - Motion Picture, as well as the Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Jack Nicholson). The runtime of the movie is 125 minutes.