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  • Midwest Malaise in About Schmidt
  • Douglas C. MacLeod Jr.
Midwest Malaise in About Schmidt, dir. Alexander Payne, 2002

Sixty-six-year-old Warren R. Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) is a recently retired insurance man who has been married for forty-two years and lives in a modest abode in the heart of Omaha, Nebraska. He wears sensible suits and is seemingly without illness or care. With an adult daughter living in Denver, Schmidt and his wife Helen (June Squibb) have an RV in the driveway raring to go. Coworkers and prior retirees respect Schmidt so much that they pitch in for a swanky retirement dinner at a staple steak and chops restaurant. Clearly, Schmidt has everything he needs—but does he have everything he wants?

This conflict drives Alexander Payne’s film, About Schmidt (2002), which was very loosely adapted from Louis Begley’s 1996 novel of the same name. The film’s reliable but thoroughly indifferent protagonist has a calm exterior, a poker face of sorts. However, underlying that flat affect is a bitter and somewhat angry nobody with nothing left. About Schmidt focuses on its protagonist’s absolute need and desire for introspection. He had been a husband, a father, a provider, a friend, and a regular everyday person for so long that he lost the ability to be an individual with a unique identity (if he ever had one). Instead, Schmidt was just a cog in the machine who was taken out and thrown away for yet another cog who is not quite as rusty.

Interestingly, About Schmidt begins like a city symphony, but without the symphony. For context, the city symphony is a form of avant-garde cinema (largely produced during the 1920s) that uses rhythmic editing and other components of film form to make urban centers like Manhattan and Berlin seem like living, breathing entities. In Payne’s film, a montage of Omaha prominently features the headquarters of Schmidt’s employer, WoodmenLife, which is a tried-and-true service-oriented company founded in 1890 to help “American families” get affordable life insurance. What makes this opening montage distinct is that viewers do not see the hustle and bustle, large crowds, honking horns, flustered bystanders [End Page 199] anxiously waiting for trains and buses, and other elements that are typical of city symphonies. Instead, viewers are shown a modest city with very little movement and then a motionless Schmidt staring at a clock and waiting for the second hand to hit 5 pm in his final moments as assistant vice president and actuary. On his desk are only a phone, suitcase, and letter bin. By the window are boxes of old files—his life’s work. Later in the film, Schmidt sees the boxes piled up next to a dumpster after visiting his younger, more confident replacement and offering help or advice. With a smile and handshake, his replacement says, “No,” and Schmidt is forced to go back home, a place of misery where his only purpose is being that of a henpecked husband.

To keep himself occupied, Schmidt watches television. While channel surfing, he comes across a commercial for Childreach, a real charity that started about the same time the film was made and discontinued its outreach in 2018. In the commercial, Angela Lansbury says that $22-a-month can save a child from poverty, hunger, and certain death. Intrigued, Schmidt calls the number and soon receives mail with information about his assigned child, Ndugu Umbo. Childreach encourages Schmidt to write to Ndugu, and this becomes an opportunity for Schmidt to vent his frustrations without any judgment. Schmidt writes about the “cocky bastard” who replaced him, old age creeping up, his aspirations to be rich and “semi-important,” and his overbearing wife, Helen. He also writes about his daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis), who is marrying waterbed salesman and rube Randall Hertzel (Dermot Mulroney). After finishing this first letter, Schmidt drives off to mail it. Helen tells him not to “dillydally.”

Upon returning home, Schmidt finds Helen dead on the kitchen floor. Even with unexpected death, the mundane still happens: Omaha stays Omaha, an uneventful city where people live and then die without fanfare. Platitudes follow at...

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