The title of Alexander Payne’s new movie, “Nebraska,” could as easily be “Coming Home” or “Out of the Past,” and it would be as true for its protagonists as for Payne itself. Nebraska is where the director is from. That bit of information (as detailed in Margaret Talbot’s Profile of Payne in the magazine) isn’t crucial to an appreciation of Payne’s haunting virtual archeology of long-sedimented family stories, but it suggests why the movie conveys such a lived-in intimacy by means of its locations and its moods. The black-and-white widescreen images of big sky, rolling land, and open air that surround the aged and dishevelled Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) as he shuffles along a highway near his home in Billings, Montana, begin the movie with a calm and confident embrace of the way the place looks and feels—even as the classical cinematic format lends them a detached mythic grandeur. From the start, Payne presents a landscape that both thrums with life and is filled with the past—a past that, in the course of the movie, he pushes to the surface in the poignant person of Woody, whose memory is going and yet who is the living agent of memory.
It’s a familiar mode for the director—it’s the basis of his most perfect work to date, his short film for the compilation “Paris, Je T’aime,” in which he excavates layers of hidden import from the grating clash of the sharp and painterly images with the shambling, seemingly oblivious presence and voice of his protagonist. “Nebraska” captures the same sort of dislocation on a grander scale, overlaying it with relocation—a series of mild or intense shocks arising from Woody’s return to his long-abandoned home town in Nebraska, in the company of his son, David (Will Forte), for whom the territory is unfamiliar and the family history unknown and even repressed.
What gets Woody and David on the road is the elderly man’s addled insistence that a sweepstakes promotion he’s received in the mail is actually a million-dollar-winning ticket that he needs to redeem in Lincoln, Nebraska. Woody is a slow-moving, hunched-over alcoholic who seems to carry years of disappointment and frustration on his back—along with the justified reproaches that his wife, Kate (June Squibb), adds to the pile. Kate is tart-tongued, active, and smart, and she bears most of the practical burden of caring for her increasingly confused and dependent husband. David, for his part, is a bright guy stuck in a dead-end job whose marriage has come apart and who lives in a furnished studio or motel room while sorting things out. When he takes his father on the road trip to see about the sweepstakes ticket, it’s not just to humor Woody or to dispel once and for all his delusion, but to get away—not on a trip of escape and liberation, but, paradoxically, of responsibility and duty, even of resignation.
There’s a febrile artifice to Payne’s setup and a tinge of theatrical exaggeration in the performances (including those of Dern and Forte) that contrast somewhat gratingly with the silky, painterly widescreen black-and-white images—and that very abrasion is the stuff of the movie. In effect, the contact with the rugged new environments (and that ruggedness is as much physical as it is emotional) does two things at once: it scrapes beneath the surfaces of those places to yield unanticipated and revealing layers of personal and family history, and it scrapes the paint off the personae and breaks through their social roles and set behavior to an unsought and uneasy vulnerability.
The heart of the story is the arrival of Woody and David in the (fictitious) town of Hawthorne, Nebraska, where, it turns out, Woody was born and where, as a young man, he had built a house—with his own hands—that now lies in ruins. It’s also where his brothers and their families live; and those families seem even less well-off than do Woody and Kate. They’re not necessarily poorer, but they seem, by comparison, stultified (even down to the crude and criminal behavior of David’s bullet-headed cousins). They simply haven’t gone far, in the literal sense—they live and seem likely to die where they were born, whereas Woody and Kate are distinguished by the simple fact that, when they met with trouble, they picked up and started over again elsewhere. Their moxie may have helped to make their sons, David and Ross, a TV newsman (played by Bob Odenkirk), a little different, and may have given them a little more energy and mental spark, but it doesn’t spare them from the agonies of their own old age, and it doesn’t make their bright and striving sons any happier.
That’s why there’s (almost) nothing satirical about Payne’s wry and sarcastic comic views of the Grant family, both nuclear and extended—his jibes are distributed all around with equally sharp pokes, if not quite with equal tenderness (he reserves a particular place in comic hell for the craven and the unsentimental). En route to Hawthorne, Woody’s long-stifled resentments begin to bubble to the surface—at first, slowly, in a drolly trivial form, and then, once there, with greater intensity and import. It turns out, however, that, in the eyes of his former neighbors and even of his brothers, Woody was no angel, and his arrival similarly dredges up their smothered pains.
The loveliest, most poignant scene in the film takes place in the sleepy office of the town’s newspaper, where David goes in quest of information and chats with the elderly editor (Angela McEwan), who, it turns out, has history with the family. It’s the scene that quietly wrenches the movie apart and makes the distant, unspoken past vibrate with a revived passionate power. It’s a scene that Payne doubles with another, of Kate’s own long-silenced reminiscences; the two women’s performances—McEwan’s, tremulously discursive, and Squibb’s, brashly so—are the true heart of the movie.
Payne wraps things up with a moment of cheerful satisfaction that packs bitter ironies. David and Woody don’t return home better equipped to face their troubles; Woody is still in decline, and David’s job and solitude await him in Billings. The knowledge that David brings back and the experiences that he’s had in Hawthorne won’t be of much help to him. Rather, the knowledge is life itself; the movie is the story of a life deepening and filling out, as if in real time—but that deepening life doesn’t improve in any practical sense. Nothing changes; and yet, at the end of the movie, nothing seems the same.