Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is funny and quietly moving, with Bruce Dern making an awkward, uncommunicative father worth the trouble of understanding. Some rural jokes are too easy, but the family feeling earns our patience.
Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is a warm, funny film about the patience an awkward parent can demand, and we recommend it despite some easy jokes. Bob Nelson’s screenplay sends Woody Grant and his son David on a journey through the American Midwest, where family history becomes difficult to ignore. The route is familiar from other father-and-son road films: time together should allow each man to understand the other. Payne makes that prospect seem difficult enough to matter, even when we can see where the drama is heading.
Bruce Dern does much of the work by declining to make Woody charming. His shambling, minimally verbal performance leaves room for stubbornness, disappointment and the ways this father has let his family down. We were moved by his difficulty in expressing himself, because Dern makes even the possibility of a frank exchange with his son feel remote. Will Forte gives David the necessary patience without making him saintly, and their scenes allow affection to coexist with the plain fact that Woody is difficult company.
June Squibb, as Woody’s wife Kate, is less inclined to wait for anyone to find the words. Her profanity is funny because it sounds like accumulated irritation finally being given its proper vocabulary. Payne and Nelson sometimes push this kind of joke too hard, treating a lack of polish as if it were enough to make a person ridiculous. Squibb keeps Kate from becoming merely a reliable source of rude lines; there is familiarity and fatigue in the force of her complaints.
Phedon Papamichael’s black-and-white photography gives the Midwestern towns a severity that suits Woody, though it risks making every ordinary place look preselected for sadness. The images work best when we have time to look at the people within them and see how they occupy these places. J. Dennis Washington’s production design gives the small-town surroundings a convincing, unshowy ordinariness. We believe in them, though their consistency can make the film feel a little too certain about what small-town life must be like.
Kevin Tent’s editing is patient with the performances, a sensible choice when Dern can make a pause worth attending to. That patience is less helpful in the opening stretch, which takes too long to establish a rhythm and occasionally leaves us waiting for the film to get going. Mark Orton’s music feels sympathetic to the film’s gentler impulses, although the acting hardly needs help in that direction. A little more briskness early on would leave the important silences just as much room.
The family history gives the journey its weight. Nelson leaves enough disappointment between father and son to prevent the trip becoming a simple exercise in reconciliation. Stacy Keach’s threatening presence as Ed Pegram is useful here, unsettling a film that could otherwise grow too comfortable in its fondness for its people. That roughness is welcome in a genre which often expects a shared car journey to cure years of poor communication.
What stays with us is the amount of attention Payne gives to a man who offers so little encouragement in return. Dern lets Woody remain stubborn and hard to reach, and Forte makes the willingness to stay beside him seem like a choice that costs something. Give it an evening when a slow conversation sounds appealing, with the warning that one participant will do everything possible to avoid having it.
