Title: On Films - About Nicholson.(Jack Nicholson)(Critical Essay)(Column)

Date: 1/13/2003; Publication: The New Republic; Author: Kauffmann, Stanley

Jack nicholson's new film, About Schmidt (New Line), verifies again what has long been clear. Any future history of American film must, if it is to be adequate, treat Nicholson as more than a star. A box-office draw, to be sure, but unlike most stars, he has done as much in his lifetime as any American screen actor to blazon, in itself, the art of acting. It used to be a theater adage that only great roles--meaning the classics--create great actors. Nicholson has shown that, in an age when the vernacular has become prosody, a great talent can create great roles. Other Americans have done this, such as Henry Fonda, Meryl Streep, and Paul Newman, but Nicholson has so dazzlingly mixed the familiar with the electric, so wonderfully transformed individuals into archetypes, that he forces us to reconsider greatness. If that word means (as I take it to mean) acting at a height that makes superior work in that role unimaginable, then Nicholson has often reached greatness in realistic acting.

Two matters follow. He has shown as well as any actor in our history that film can, at its optimum and with some good luck, be a medium for artistic growth. And he proves that true versatility is fundamentally insight. This actor, whose sheer personality was his mode of entry into fame, proves that, through insight, the asset/burden of personality need not be a bar to surpassing that personality.

About Schmidt is certainly not his last work--another Nicholson film soon arrives--yet this film is so striking a change of venue for Nicholson that it invites a retrospect of his career. He first drew wide attention in Easy Rider (1969), when he was thirty-two. He had been in a number of plays in the Los Angeles area, but he was essentially a creature of the film world, having made his way up from an office-boy job at MGM through some twenty small-scale films before Easy Rider, as actor and writer and producer. The sight of Nicholson in Easy Rider, in a football helmet on the back of a motorcycle, smiling his way belatedly into adventure, was like discovering a nugget that promised a rich lode. He lost little time in staking the claim for us.

To date Nicholson has made eighty films. Out of this host I select three roles to exemplify his range. In Five Easy Pieces (1970), his Bobby Dupea was the tormented incarnation of an artist fleeing the strictures of art for the refuge of ordinary life. The moment in which, alone in his car, he flies into a frenzy at the thought of his obligations is still a thunderclap in memory. (And, not incidentally, in this film he and the woman from the bowling alley have one of the hottest sex scenes outside the porn trade.) As the Joker in Batman (1989), he transformed a commedia dell'arte clown into a writhing menace of modern nightmare. In the title role of Hoffa (1992), an excellent film lost in the distribution shuffle, he created the coarse labor leader, ethically murky in his own life, yet fiercely dedicated to his job--a performance that ought to be one of the many Nicholson examples available in schools of acting. (So many others. The obedient yet quizzical sailor in The Last Detail, the morally perplexed reporter in Antonioni's The Passenger, the rebellious patient in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest....)

As happens with all good actors, to remember the Nicholson gallery while watching About Schmidt is to feel that one is expanding one's wealth. This is the second time in a row that he has played a retiree. In last year's The Pledge he was a detective leaving the force but getting entangled in another case. Here he is Warren Schmidt, a retiring insurance executive who gets entangled in quite different trouble, the emptiness of his life without his job. Thoreau's most famous line--"the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"-- resounds here as Schmidt realizes that his job has been a drug to keep him from facing Thoreau's chill. In our first glimpse of him, he is seated in his stripped office on his last day, waiting for five o'clock, when he will be free. But he is not free; he is denuded. The small professional smile that he carries with him to the company party in his honor is no defense against the secret fright that drives him out of the party for a drink by himself.

The details of what then happens to Schmidt are exactly that--details. If his uncongenial wife had not suddenly died, if he had not made the long trip to his daughter's wedding where he has to face aspects of himself, other crinkles and wrinkles in dailiness might have been equally scarifying. The role does not quite provide the amplitude that Nicholson could use, yet his Schmidt, grizzled, a bit heavy, gently smiles his way into confrontation with inner bankruptcy. Through a children's aid agency he "adopts" a Tanzanian child, and for $22 per month he gets some sort of slender purpose in life. In voice-overs, he has the chance to confide to this boy the secrets he wishes he didn't have.

As has sometimes happened in the past, Nicholson's performance is the raison d'etre of a less than overwhelming screenplay. Alexander Payne, the director, and Jim Taylor have adapted a Louis Begley novel (unread by me) to accommodate Nicholson. I gather that Begley's book is set in upper-class Long Island. The film moves to middle-class generality. Schmidt now lives in Omaha, Nebraska (Payne's hometown), and his new prize possession is a Winnebago motor home. Some of Payne's directing touches are sure. That opening overhead glimpse of Schmidt in his nearly vacant office is like being thrust into a chunk of emptiness. When Schmidt is at his wife's graveside service, he looks at her coffin, then glances upward. Payne then gives us not the smiling heavens but gray sky glimpsed through the bare scraggly branches of an autumn tree.

But some of the matters in the script are out of kilter. In the weeks after his wife dies, Schmidt lets his house get strewn with mess and dirty dishes. This seems a sitcom gag imposed on an extremely orderly man. His Winnebago does not get similarly messed up when he travels in it and the joke has served its turn. Schmidt's advances on a trailer- park woman, the wife of a friendly neighbor, are distressingly incredible.

Still, About Schmidt stands as a poignant marker in the career of a major artist. It helps to certify that Nicholson's very charm cannot obscure his eminence. At the least--and there is much more--he has here done again what he has often done before, as with the rigid colonel in A Few Good Men or the dissolute astronaut in Terms of Endearment: he has transmuted a role into a truth.

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