Woody Grant and his son David prepare for a road trip in “Nebraska”.
“Nebraska” could have been a movie named for any remote, out-in-the-boondocks, sparsely populated, and hardly 21st century acculturated community 0f hardworking people living out or working pretty hard at trying to dodge the hard the same basic hard realities of everyday life.
Don’t recall a single cell phone in use as a prop in this movie. If there was one in play, it wasn’t memorable. The biggest high-tech occurrence in the film occurs on a Sunday afternoon when all the aging brothers, some of them, including Bruce Dern’s character, are gathered in one of their houses in Hawthorne, Nebraska to watch Detroit and Chicago play a NFL game on national television. They all sit there, staring silently at the screen, a couple even asleep with their mouths falling open into the agape position, watching with all the animation of a petrified human forest.
“West Texas”, “South Texas”, or even “Beeville” would have worked equally well as specific titles and community settings.
Bruce Dern plays Woody Grant, an old man slipping hard into dementia who late in life learns that not even alcohol can protect him any longer from feeling “used up” and “put upon” by the vagaries of aging. When a man is too old to work, has lost his driver’s license, and is pretty much imprisoned at home in his the small clapboard house he shares with his nagging wife in Billings, Montana, and where the only other sound of constancy is the howling wind, Woody needs a dream, even a delusional one, to get himself on the road to “something” again – or maybe, for the first time.
The plot device is simple. Woody finds out from one of those mail ads that he’s “won a million dollars” from a company drawing in Lincoln, Nebraska. Woody ignores, or chooses not to see the second part of this news that clearly states he’s won “if” he also has proof that he holds the winning number. That part doesn’t matter, at first. It was enough news to get Woody out there trying to either walk or hitchhike his way alone to Nebraska to claim his prize.
Will Forte, who plays one of Woody’s two sons, David Grant, sees the scam that his father has bought into, but fails to reach his father with the truth about this “come on.” The son also sees the larger truth that drives his father. All he’s got at home is a nagging wife and nothing to feel good about or look forward to doing with his basically used up time on earth in failing health. Given the gravity of that greater weight, David Grant agrees to drive his father to Lincoln to collect the prize.
What happens from here is one of the most beautifully executed movies I’ve seen in a very long time. Filmed in black and white on wide-screen, the drab and dooming grays of the landscape serve only to amplify the desperation that runs loudly through the mostly quiet landscape of this fine story, but I wouldn’t spoil the rest of it for anything in the world. You have to see it.
Dern and Forte are magnificent as father and son – June Squibb, who plays Woody’s cantankerous wife, Kate Grant, are the driving forces of a funny, but sad American family story. As for as “family” goes, it’s not what we would have considered a family film in my day. There are certain depictions, ideas, and language here that are not suitable in my mind for children, but the story is a “don’t miss it” for adults.
Tags: Nebraska Review
The Pecan Park Eagle 
February 28, 2014 at 4:10 pm |
Just saw it last night and I agree with everything you say. Dern is incredible and his wife (Squibb) nearly steals the show. However, I found the movie to be quite uplifting at the end–always time for redemption.
February 28, 2014 at 6:09 pm |
One of the biggest laughs in the theater came when Kate (Jane Squibb) is in the cemetery giving a commentary on all of Woody’s relatives buried there. When her son, David, asks where her relatives are buried, she says that they’re over in the Catholic cemetery. “They wouldn’t be caught dead in a Lutheran cemetery,” she says.