About Schmidt

By EWAN McDONALD

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Jack Nicholson is on a road trip across America. Jack Nicholson is in a hot-tub with a naked woman. But this is not the dropout lawyer on a Harley in Easy Rider or the new man in town seducing the housewives of Eastwick: those were 35 and 16 years ago. This is 60-something Jack Nicholson confronting his own senior citizenship, and that of his character, Warren Schmidt.

As the movie opens, Schmidt is watching the clock on the office wall tick over to 5 o'clock, check-out time from his job as an insurance salesman in Nebraska. After an uncomfortable farewell dinner he and his wife, Helen (June Squibb), return to their obsessively tidy home, its carefully presented knick-knacks, expecting to pass their days touring America in an oversized campervan.

Except that Helen ruins their plans by dropping dead on the kitchen floor. This was not in the retirement plan.

Schmidt has nowhere to go and no reason to stay. He heads out on the highway in the Winnebago, driving across the country to his daughter's wedding.

Schmidt and his daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis), have unresolved issues. She's fed up with him and he can't abide the man she's marrying, Randall Hertzel (Dermot Mulroney), who sells waterbeds and pyramid schemes. When he arrives at their place after a superannuated version of the Easy Rider adventure, the buttoned-down former insurance salesman has to cope with more surprises: learning how to get into a waterbed and how to cope with Randall's aged hippie mother, Roberta (Kathy Bates).

The only light in Schmidt's world is a 6-year-old Tanzanian boy, Ndugu, who he signs on to help through one of those TV ads for charity, and to whom he finally manages to pour out his feelings in long letters, even though he doesn't know whether the boy can read.

For all that it is a tragedy and not the comedy that it is claimed to be, for all that it is a downbeat film, Nicholson's performance, bringing to ... well, not life, perhaps better to say, bringing to the screen an empty shell of a man, is remarkable.

DVD features: movie (124 min); 9 deleted scenes.