Black and white film not lacking in colour, writes Tom McKinlay.
Director: Alexander Payne
Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, Bob Odenkirk, Stacy Keach, Devin Ratray, Rance Howard
Rating (M)
5 stars out of 5
Nebraska is presented in black and white, the absence of colour only serving to heighten all else.
Unadorned America emerges in director Alexander Payne's (About Schmidt, The Descendants) film in a more convincing livery of desperation, mediocrity and farce. With no possibility of postcard picturesque, we are left with the performances and the story, which are respectively compelling and involving.
The story revolves around Woody (Bruce Dern), an embittered old man, whose life, as with the film, has been drained of colour, and whose mental acuity is immediately in doubt. Woody believes he has won a million dollars in a junk-mail lottery and is determined to set off across country to collect. He doesn't drive so his son David (Will Forte) steps in to do the honours, though certain his father's dream of avarice is delusion.
Dern's performance is masterful, his shuffling vacuity capturing the grumpy frustration of an old man teetering on the brink of dementia, while allowing Woody's fear and hurt to simmer just below the surface.
Nebraska is about American men, their shortcomings and failures. At one point Woody's largely male extended family assembles, only to discover they have nothing to say or share from their lives.
While the landscape is bleak, Payne delivers moments of comedy whenever required, to keep the film from listing into melancholia, and to provide contrast to the pails full of pathos.
Best thing: The performances, among them the broad comedy of Woody's feisty wife and slapstick menace of his criminal nephews.
Worst thing: The female roles are either unsympathetic or slight.
See it with: Your dad.
