Schmidt was full of it. Filler that is. It was the dullest film I've started watching in ten years.
I'm not a Nicholson fan, & Schmidt (that's a beer, right?) didn't help. I recall an understated character prone to explosions in "5 Easy Pieces". Hmmm, here he is again. "I wanted to get the Mini-Winni". And you *did*, Jack.
As for the "point" of the "story", 1956's "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" developed this theme decades earlier. Joni Mitchell's song "The Arrangement" which sings about a man who "could have been more than a name on the door / on the 33rd floor in the air / More than a credit card, swimming pool in the backyard", makes the same "point" much more movingly in a song that lasts a few minutes.
The suburban lifestyle *was* adequately pilloried in the 70s. Then, that 70s generation went on to develop it far beyond the vapid nothingness it represented in those happier, if blinkered, times. Nicholson was part of that generation. He did pretty well at cashing in.
No doubt many people who don't like this film see themselves reflected in it just a litte *too* much. But stop and consider that Schmidt pretty much did all the things majoritarian American culture asked of him. Dressed right, lied convincingly, built a good home. He was even a part of the insurance industry, which a great majority of Americans invest heavily in. Is majoritarian American culture, then, life-avoiding ... or is it a facile if uninspiring adaptation to the world full of violence, duplicity and tedium Jarmusch paints in "Dead Man"?
"Schmidt" is an easy exercise in mud-tossing. It's easy to criticize existing instutions without a vision of viable alternatives. The roles people have been offered and played faithfully in our culture may well be vapid, but what choices did they have? In failing to address how the options were engineered, "Schmidt" writes a check (for $22 to a foster child, about as magnanimous as the Thompson approach to welfare) that it, like so many films of the 70s era, can't cash.
I'm not a Nicholson fan, & Schmidt (that's a beer, right?) didn't help. I recall an understated character prone to explosions in "5 Easy Pieces". Hmmm, here he is again. "I wanted to get the Mini-Winni". And you *did*, Jack.
As for the "point" of the "story", 1956's "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" developed this theme decades earlier. Joni Mitchell's song "The Arrangement" which sings about a man who "could have been more than a name on the door / on the 33rd floor in the air / More than a credit card, swimming pool in the backyard", makes the same "point" much more movingly in a song that lasts a few minutes.
The suburban lifestyle *was* adequately pilloried in the 70s. Then, that 70s generation went on to develop it far beyond the vapid nothingness it represented in those happier, if blinkered, times. Nicholson was part of that generation. He did pretty well at cashing in.
No doubt many people who don't like this film see themselves reflected in it just a litte *too* much. But stop and consider that Schmidt pretty much did all the things majoritarian American culture asked of him. Dressed right, lied convincingly, built a good home. He was even a part of the insurance industry, which a great majority of Americans invest heavily in. Is majoritarian American culture, then, life-avoiding ... or is it a facile if uninspiring adaptation to the world full of violence, duplicity and tedium Jarmusch paints in "Dead Man"?
"Schmidt" is an easy exercise in mud-tossing. It's easy to criticize existing instutions without a vision of viable alternatives. The roles people have been offered and played faithfully in our culture may well be vapid, but what choices did they have? In failing to address how the options were engineered, "Schmidt" writes a check (for $22 to a foster child, about as magnanimous as the Thompson approach to welfare) that it, like so many films of the 70s era, can't cash.