The cover of Springsteen’s Nebraska LP shows a provincial highway, glimpsed from a dashboard, uncoiling endlessly into a grim hang of wintry sky. The lyrics recreate that road-trip through mournful hopes and everyday struggle, and Springsteen sings of a “dark highway” across which “our sins lie unatoned”. It is difficult not to recall that quintessentially American metaphor when watching Alexander Payne’s semi-comic drama of meandering existentialism. Not least because it opens with a slouching and elderly Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), shambling across a lonely highway. He is walking the 850-mile distance to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect on a 1 million dollar sweepstakes prize. It is clear that his winning ticket is a scam, a magazine subscription falsely made-up with the promise of fortune. But Woody’s singular purpose in adventuring after that make-believe treasure is not mere dementia, of which he is clearly suffering: here is a man at the threshold of mortality, trembling with fatal regret at a past which threatens to be meaningless. The carefully folded ticket is his promise of redemption.
Woody is rescued from the sidewalk by his younger son David (Will Forte) and taken back to his home in Billings, Montana. His acid-tongued but adoring wife Kate (June Squibb) and his elder boy Ross (Bob Odenkirk) are contemplating whether it is at last time to consign him to a nursing home. Woody was never much of a father or family man, we are told. But for David, who has reached the cul-de-sac of his career in selling stereo equipment and has recently split apart from his long-time girlfriend, a journey to Nebraska presents a half-charming escape – a space to disconnect from the endlessly repeatable routines of the mediocre everyday, and to offer his father some psychic closure.
Their first stop is Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne, Nebraska, portrayed as a dreary monochromatic smear of Midwestern melancholy. This is a city which feels like a memory of itself, where its cohort of old-timers throng the main street bars and speak the language of nostalgia. When Woody lets slip that he’s a millionaire-in-waiting, he suddenly transforms from grouchy nobody to saviour of the Cornhusker State: now everybody remembers some half-forgotten favour they want repaid in a portion of Woody’s winnings. Nebraska lets the enabling fiction of the prize money offer Woody an embattled moment of self-worth, but also draws out the most venal, cash-mongering impulses of the small-town community and his extended family. Meanwhile, David floats around the flotsam of his father’s past life – old loves, an abandoned homestead – and discovers enigmatic pieces of the biographical puzzle.
Nebraskais a wonderful study of a fragmented nuclear family, which eventually shifts its horizons to provincial America and its passions and repressions. It sometimes works too obviously with symbolism, and does surrender to the sentimentality of its father-son dynamic. But through austere black-and-white cinematography, numerous comic episodes and the slow unfurling of Payne’s (Sideways,The Descendants) narrative, it comes to command the perfect tone for its drama.
The cover of Springsteen’s Nebraska LP shows a provincial highway, glimpsed from a dashboard, uncoiling endlessly into a grim hang of wintry sky. The lyrics recreate that road-trip through mournful hopes and everyday struggle, and Springsteen sings of a “dark highway” across which “our sins lie unatoned”. It is difficult not to recall that quintessentially American metaphor when watching Alexander Payne’s semi-comic drama of meandering existentialism. Not least because it opens with a slouching and elderly Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), shambling across a lonely highway. He is walking the 850-mile distance to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect on a 1 million dollar sweepstakes prize. It is clear that his winning ticket is a scam, a magazine subscription falsely made-up with the promise of fortune. But Woody’s singular purpose in adventuring after that make-believe treasure is not mere dementia, of which he is clearly suffering: here is a man at the threshold of mortality, trembling with fatal regret at a past which threatens to be meaningless. The carefully folded ticket is his promise of redemption.
Woody is rescued from the sidewalk by his younger son David (Will Forte) and taken back to his home in Billings, Montana. His acid-tongued but adoring wife Kate (June Squibb) and his elder boy Ross (Bob Odenkirk) are contemplating whether it is at last time to consign him to a nursing home. Woody was never much of a father or family man, we are told. But for David, who has reached the cul-de-sac of his career in selling stereo equipment and has recently split apart from his long-time girlfriend, a journey to Nebraska presents a half-charming escape – a space to disconnect from the endlessly repeatable routines of the mediocre everyday, and to offer his father some psychic closure.
Their first stop is Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne, Nebraska, portrayed as a dreary monochromatic smear of Midwestern melancholy. This is a city which feels like a memory of itself, where its cohort of old-timers throng the main street bars and speak the language of nostalgia. When Woody lets slip that he’s a millionaire-in-waiting, he suddenly transforms from grouchy nobody to saviour of the Cornhusker State: now everybody remembers some half-forgotten favour they want repaid in a portion of Woody’s winnings. Nebraska lets the enabling fiction of the prize money offer Woody an embattled moment of self-worth, but also draws out the most venal, cash-mongering impulses of the small-town community and his extended family. Meanwhile, David floats around the flotsam of his father’s past life – old loves, an abandoned homestead – and discovers enigmatic pieces of the biographical puzzle.
Nebraskais a wonderful study of a fragmented nuclear family, which eventually shifts its horizons to provincial America and its passions and repressions. It sometimes works too obviously with symbolism, and does surrender to the sentimentality of its father-son dynamic. But through austere black-and-white cinematography, numerous comic episodes and the slow unfurling of Payne’s (Sideways,The Descendants) narrative, it comes to command the perfect tone for its drama.