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Review
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Good film about a rare subject (for movies): aging. Jack
Nicholson plays Warren R. Schmidt, a non-descript retired
insurance executive. We join him on the day of his
retirement in one of the most memorable scenes in the
movie-- Schmidt sitting at this desk on his last day waiting
for the clock to tick off the last few minutes of his
career. He goes home and the film follows his adjustment to
retired life, which is shortly disrupted by the death of his
wife Helen (June Squibb). His daughter comes for the
funeral with her fiance, whom Warren despises. Then the
story leads us on a cross-country excursion as Schmidt takes
his motor-home to attend Jeannie's wedding to Randall
Hertzel (Dermot Mulroney), a flakey water-bed salesman who
believes in pyramid schemes. Along the way, he experiences
America as an older, retired man, a little bereft of
purpose, lost in himself, grouchy, but apparently open to
something new-- if it can only hit him in the right way.
Some of the information about Schmidt comes from the letters
he writes to a child he has sponsored in Tanzania called
Ndugu (whose photo is of a real-life child, Abdallah Mtulu.)
Ebert in his review, quites Thoreau-- "the mass of men lead
lives of quiet desperation". That came to my mind as well
as I watched this movie, especially as Schmidt gradually
discovers that his replacement at work has found Schmidt's
accumulated life's wisdom entirely dispensible.
Other information about Schmidt comes from his experience
with his daughter's fiance's family. They are exuberant and
trashy and exotic to Schmidt, and, predictably, he is
repelled by them. It is compliment to Payne you aren't
clobbered with the contrast. You can't see what Schmidt
takes from them, because he is such a hollow man to begin
with that there is nothing to latch on to.
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