Movie Review: "Nebraska"

"Nebraska": B-.  Seventy-seven year old actor Bruce Dern has made a decades-spanning career playing villains, mentally imbalanced fringe dwellers, sociopaths and stone cold killers.  One of his claims to fame is that Dern may be the only actor whose film resume includes bumping off John Wayne's character in a movie (1972's The Cowboys).  Dern's characters are always a little south of normal, on the edge; not the kind of guy you'd want to go have a beer with.  For the last twenty-five years or so, it would be natural to wonder if, in real life, Dern would become a dazed and confused senior citizen, not fully in tune with his surroundings, even though capable at times of carrying on a coherent conversation.

Thus, the question is raised again as we watch Dern play Woody Grant, an ornery, semi-lucid, unsocial man, in Nebraska.  Is this fine acting or is this Dern's real life persona?  Woody is first seen walking, determinedly yet oblivious to his surroundings, along the shoulder of a Billings, Montana highway.  His destination is Lincoln, Nebraska, 850 miles away.  He has received a letter alerting him that he is eligible to win a million dollars as a sweepstakes prize.  Mercifully, a state trooper picks him up and alerts Woody's son, David (Will Forte), to come to the police station and fetch him.  We later learn from a conversation between David and his brother, Ross (Bob Odenkirk), that Woody was a negligent uninvolved father.  Not much of a husband either, it turns out.  His wife, Kate (June Squibb), is a foul-mouthed unhappy woman, with nothing good to say about her glossy-eyed husband.  Neither Kate nor Ross can fathom David's willingness to drive Woody to Lincoln, especially when everyone (including David) knows that the letter Woody received is a come-on. It does not literally say that Woody has won anything, much less a million dollars.  But David does not want his father to face the inevitable unpleasant truth alone.

At this point Nebraska turns into a road movie.  The father and son travel through Wyoming and South Dakota, heading east without incident.  It's when they get to Woody's home town, fictional Hawthorne, Nebraska, that things pick up.  Woody's brother, Ray (Rance Howard, who strongly resembles Dern), and his wife reside in an old house in Hawthorne.  Their two adult sons, Bart (Tim Driscoll) and Cole (Devin Ratray), are no-account lugs who still live with them.  The main attractions in town are the two saloons, the Sodbuster and the Blinker Bar.  It's in the Blinker where Woody and David reconnect with Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), Woody's old business partner who once borrowed an air compressor from Woody and never returned it.  That minor nugget of info comes into play later in the story.

The scene of Woody and his brothers in Ray's living room watching a televised football game is humorous. There's a room full of people, each of whom might as well be by himself.  They stare at the TV as if in a trance.  Director Alexander Payne also gets high marks for nailing small town life on the Great Plains.  Word travels fast that "Woody is a millionaire."  The taverns are the social center of Hawthorne. (That concept reminds me of the lyrics to Jason Aldean's song, Church Pew Or Bar Stool, in which Aldean describes churches and bars as "the only two means of salvation" available in small towns.)  Some folks are genuinely happy for Woody, while others come up with fabrications as to why he should spread a little bit of his future new found wealth their way.  When Kate and Ross arrive by bus to hook up with their Hawthorne relatives, the stage is set for some feudin', fussin' and fightin'.

With the exception of David's cousins Bart and Cole, two hicks who are the human equivalents of bumps on a log, I did not find the characters to be very interesting, and certainly not charming.  Woody is almost catatonic as a passenger in David's car, not a good thing considering this is a road movie.  There is no range of emotion or growth in the characters of Woody or Kate; he is always aloof and rude, and she is always profane and rude.  That gets tiresome over the course of a two hour movie.  Forte as David fares somewhat better, but his bland personality, even when breaking up with his girlfriend, is still a long way from memorable.  Considering the timing of the movie's late-year release and the Oscar buzz possibilities for Dern and Squibb, I was mildly disappointed.

When I posted my January 10 review of Philomena, I wrote that the story would set the Catholic Church back twenty or more years.  Nebraska just might have the same impact on its namesake state.  As an ex patriot of the Peace Garden State, I'm glad that the movie was not titled North Dakota.