Nebraska

If there’s any genre that I think is difficult to make operate effectively in film, it’s the road movie. “The journey is the destination” mantra that hovers over these films typically reduces us into episodic moments in which the loosely assembled narrative frequently threatens to come undone by a parade of quirky side characters the hero meets along the way, and the rapidly shifting tones as we move from one stop to the next. There needs to be something strong holding the entire enterprise together than a yearning to be upon the road, or for the character to find himself long the way.

I will admit that when Nebraska started I was quite worried that it would venture into this same territory. That it would possibly even take some mean-spirited pot shots at flyover states and their denizens. But as the film kept going, I got more involved with its rhythm, and eventually a part of it touched my spirit. I began to rather enjoy its lack of sentimentality, that a lot of the characters were fuck-ups and hard-asses. People were willing to look at life’s hardships squarely in the face and not flinch, but instead work through them with a dogged determination and just get it done.

Much of the credit for this entire film working at all goes to Bruce Dern’s quiet, contradictory performance. He plays an alcoholic, slowly succumbing to memory loss that has remained a mystery to those closest to him. Woody is obsessed with the possibility that an obvious scheme may actually be his ticket to easy riches, and, I suspect, for the first time ever has decided to become proactive about something. One suspects that he’s lucid enough to know that this is his one last shot at completing a task like this, no matter how foolish.

Dern finds the truth to this man and plays it for all that it’s worth. As each day passes, Dern has his character awaken with a joy in his eyes and bounding in his step that is then trampled upon by the mundane and repetitive nature of his environments. This fool’s gold of a prize is an obvious MacGuffin, an errand only for those without the basic knowledge to spot an obvious attempt at manipulation. Yet Dern invests this dream with believability and an earnestness that is almost pitiable and charming in equal doses. The same could be said for his frequent alcoholic episodes in which he promptly says fairly terrible or emotionally damaging things to the people around him, not out of malice or spite, but from simply lacking in the common courtesy of thinking before speaking.

Will Forte, yes the one from SNL, proves to have unexpected depths as a dramatic actor. I’m so used to seeing his grotesqueries on SNL or 30 Rock that to see him play a real person so believably is almost perverse. Yet there he is, bringing a wounded melancholia and crumbling pride as the younger son of Dern who accompanies his father on the journey for a variety of reasons. One of them is clearly to keep an eye on the old man, another is to discover something about his father, and himself, along the way. It’s never too late to change or grow as a person if you truly want to, and Forte’s character experiences the most growth as he transitions from a man slowly becoming exactly like his father, to one filled with agency and a clearer picture of who he would like to be.

But Nebraska is easily stolen by June Squibb as Dern’s long-suffering wife. While she may be shoved into the long-suffering wife role, that doesn’t mean her character is as one-note and expected as that. Squibb takes every opportunity to create the crass, tough, devil-may-care persona of this particular woman. A scene in the cemetery where she offers up particularly brusque and rude insights about family history and character traits is gut-busting for how committed she is to saying terrible things in a straight-forward way. Even better is a scene late in the film where she unloads on the scheming relatives who are trying to grab a piece of Dern’s alleged winnings.

Yet it’s the morose nature hovering over Nebraska that stays with me. The sense that the main character is easily coming closer and closer to staring death in the face, and the uncomfortable, often painful attempts at two generations trying to understand each other. I think Forte walked away at the end of the film understanding his personal history and his personality just a bit better, but what an awkward journey to get there. Mixing tragedy with comedy is hard, but somewhere Alexander Payne manages to do it every time he steps up to the bat.