Recencies van critici

Nebraska is perhaps Payne's finest work yet. This is partly because he has minimized the cheap sub-Coens yokel humor to the point that it's almost negligible. A few vestigial rube gags remain, most notably in the form of the overweight cousins who bully David (Will Forte) and eventually try to strong-arm Woody (Bruce Dern) out of his supposed million-dollar prize. Payne seems to finally realize that this kind of "Hee Haw" pseudo-comedy undercuts his higher aspirations.

What transpires on this canvas amounts to a state of the union. Regret and loss hang heavy over the landscape. The premise—a delusional man on a quest to claim a non-existent prize—may seem flimsy-cute, but it deepens into something genuinely moving.

...In the deceptively schmaltzy denouement, we're not quite watching a man's triumphant re-discovery of himself, but rather the full emergence of a new, more dispiriting form of father-son bonding predicated on the temporary relegation of real problems to shiny distractions.

The result is certainly not the most ingratiating of Payne's movies but it's hard not to be impressed by the way it holds its nerve, refusing to give Woody any grandstanding cri de coeur speeches, never going soft on us, but shaping the contours of the road-trip narrative so that the son's growing realisation and acceptance of his father's largely wasted life and irreversible decline are seen as the self-knowledge he himself needs to deal with his fortysomething malaise.

The tall tales, one-liners, and complex blend of Midwestern good nature and anomie are from Bob Nelson's screenplay (his first). What Payne lends is a sense of menace and melancholy that, after About Schmidt, Sideways, and The Descendants, feels bracingly new for him.

The theme of Nebraska... is deep and resonant even if the homespun melodies laid over top of it are often tinny and thin. That the moment when Woody admits that he only went chasing after a jackpot so that he'd have something, anything, to leave to his kids after a lifetime spent steadily losing everything he worked for feels so methodically blueprinted does little to diminish its genuine melancholy. Reader, I cried.

For all the knockabout stuff, and the sometimes outrageous one-liners, Nebraska is often at its best when illuminating the Grants' ordinary griefs and complaints—and managing to pull back from sentiment.

Ever since "About Schmidt," and never more so than in "Nebraska," the calculated wheels of comedy loudly whirr in the foreground. By all reports, Nelson's original script kept the comedy to a low volume, while Payne's additions amped it up. The intent may have been to add warmth to a pretty sad tale, but the result is broad manipulation when simple, human storytelling—say, in the vein of Richard Ford—would have been enough.

It's a career-capping performance by Dern, who is so convincing as an addled, drunken, embittered and probably dying man that he doesn't appear to be acting, but Forte is just as good playing a preoccupied, emotionally constricted man-child... These two aspects of the movie are sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict, and after two viewings I feel like there's a dissonance at the heart of "Nebraska" that Payne doesn't quite control.

For a while, as the two make their way southeast, Nebraska works surprisingly well as a bittersweet twofer. Dern, that veteran of American cinema, disappears completely into his role. He nails the distant, cantankerous spirit of his character—a man who's not quite there, even as he's locked in conversation. It's when Nebraska veers off the road, and into the one-horse town David grew up in, that condescending comedy begins to take precedence.

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... 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...

Alexander Payne's "Nebraska" is a slow-burning heart-warmer that neatly dodges the cornball bullet of a climactic manly hug. Indeed, it's Payne's best movie since his old Jack Nicholson road movie "About Schmidt"—and, in its absence of grandstanding, perhaps better than that.