About Schmidt

Rating:
Summary: Craptastically fecal flavored
Review: This movie is about as interesting and fast paced as your average retiree's life. Dull, stupid and aimless. You can drone on and on about character study and how great you thought the camera angles were. No matter what crap you try to say and make yourself look subjective and intelligent..this movie is just a dog s#!t taco.

Rating:
Summary: Important Character Study
Review: No one ever tells this story, but it's one we all want or need to see. Schmidt sitting in is office on the last day of work until the clock strikes 5:00 pm, says it all about this man. There is nothing to do, but he is putting in a full days work, on his last day of work, just the same. Who would still be sitting in their office until quitting time, on their last day of work with nothing to do? Guys like Schmidt; guys that put in an honest days work, for an honest days pay, regardless of the consequences.

The problem with Schmidt is that his world has changed. The post Depression/World War II sensibilities are no longer respected and is values are not currently in fashion. The John Wanye/Gary Cooper style of never showing emotion or even acknowledging emotions has been disregarded, because it led to unbearable pain. We witness Schmidt at the height of his pain, as he considers his trivial existence.

The metaphors are in your face. The gigantic motorhome, the letters and money to a disconnected African child, the Cadillac, the pictures of the daughter in her English riding attire, the road trip of discovery (alas, not on motorcycles this time), the hippy dippy granny (Kathy Bates) and her goofy ex (Howard Hessmann).

If we live long enough, the reward for every man or woman is to evaluate our contributions to the world and consider if we ever mattered. There is a message in this movie, and it maybe different for everyone. That's what makes it so good.


Rating:
Summary: Dear Ndugu,
Review: I gotta say this has been quite a movie. Very funny and at the same time, sad. You have gotta watch this one.

Rating:
Summary: @b0Ut Sh!T
Review: not funny. had a naked old lady in it. no plot. made me wanna puke. so, this movie definately deserves the title "worst movie ever"

Rating:
Summary: Sad comedy
Review: Much of the problem of this movie could have been solved by getting a good housekeeper.The rest of the decisions was made with the help of Jack Nicholson' check book and he could have simply closed it.I know , I would have......

Rating:
Summary: About Camus
Review: Warren Schmidt could be described in these existential terms:

"[He is] afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia"
"[He] remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions."
"[He] exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with `the gentle indifference of the world' remains ... compelling."
[Quotes from the Amazon archives]

However, these descriptions are aimed at Monsieur Meursault, Camus' title character in The Stranger, not Warren Schmidt. Indeed, this connection between Schmidt and Meursault resonated with me throughout my viewing of About Schmidt. From the opening scene, where Schmidt sits in his antiseptic office waiting for 5:00pm (or is it Godot he waits for?), to the climatic speech given at his daughter's wedding, Jack Nicholson's character seems several steps removed from his own existence.

We come to find that Schmidt evolved into his current condition. Like an animal, trained and conditioned into submissiveness, Schmidt has learned to sit when he pees, listen rather than talk, and generally conform to the wishes of his wife. His feelings that early in life he held the potential to be something have been quashed and he now can only function in a robotic manner.

Through it all, however, the raw human emotions - the real Schmidt, bubble to the surface. We first see this in his initial letter to Ndugu, in which he slowly and then uncontrollable produces a litany of complaints against his wife Helen. Her death begins a journey of confused exploration for Schmidt. In a wonderfully comedic metaphor, the oversized RV, the Adventurer, becomes Schmidt's new home as he goes "On the Road." He reaches out to people in new ways, experiences things and see places he has been unfamiliar with, and he is seemingly primed for a rebirth.

In this light, how do we interpret the ending? Schmidt's speech at the wedding is not an honest exploration of his feelings. It seeks accommodation and includes small (perhaps damning) praise for his new in-laws. From the wedding, he travels straight home, making only one stop to visit an exhibit honoring past frontier explorers. By this point, Schmidt has sunk into despair, aware of the inconsequence of his life. Nicholson's look of horror is compelling and is perhaps a transcription of Munch's The Scream from one medium to another. Schmidt is a man who has reached the final stage of his life and has fully faced its meaninglessness.

However, in that moment of sad and painful revelation, Schmidt finds a letter written to him from the nun who helps raise his Tanzanian "foster son," Ndugu. It concludes by saying that Ndugu wishes him the best and, since Ndugu cannot read or write, he sends along a painting that he created just for Schmidt. Looking at that simple painting of two stick-people smiling and holding hands, Schmidt is overcome by emotion - honest emotion that we have not seen throughout the movie. Nicholson's face portrays a mixture of joy and pain that in itself should be qualification for an Oscar nomination.

Camus believed that men, thrust into a godless universe, must make individual moral decisions and thus create some small meaning. Perhaps this is what the tears at the end of About Schmidt are all about.


Rating:
Summary: Punch yourself in the doo-dads. It's less painful.
Review: Jack Nicholson is a genius and nearly every movie he has made is brilliant. That said, this film is a turd.

Schmidt is an unredeemable character who discovers upon retirement that he failed as a human being and wasn't even great at the work he traded his humanity for. The movie chronicles Schmidt's banal post retirement pursuits that result in nothing but personal pain, alienation and deeper desperation.

If you enjoy sticking bamboo splinters under your fingernails, cutting your tongue and squeezing lemon juice on the wound or ripping the hair out of your armpits with tweezers, you'll love this movie. It is pure agony to watch!







Rating:
Summary: A good, quirky comedy
Review: Jack Nicholson is Warren Schmidt, recently retired from an exciting career in the insurance industry. Schmidt's wife dies unexpectedly, shortly before his daughters wedding. As he travels by RV to try and talk some sense into her, Schmidt contemplates the significance of his own long life along the way. The film skillfully transitions between outrageous laughs and Schmidt's sometimes unpleasant reflections.

I noticed right away that About Schmidt is no ordinary comedy. I have a little trouble finding exactly the right words to describe it. At first it might seem like a black or dark comedy, and a good case could well be made. Still, that's not quite right to me, Schmidt lacks the irony I would normally expect from a dark comedy. Instead, I would describe the humor as natural, innate, uncontrived. It's the opposite of a situational comedy such as a romantic comedy or a buddy film. Schmidt has no setups and no punch lines. We simply witness Schmidt's rather ordinary life, and it just is funny.

Schmidt is a man in his sixties and still adjusting to his new life of retirement when his wife dies suddenly. His life quickly descends into a total mess as he struggles to come to grips with his conflicting emotions regarding his late wife, and simple daily survival without her dutiful caretaking. Schmidt comes to focus on his daughters pending wedding to a man he considers a total loser and far beneath his little princess. He travels by RV to Denver for the wedding and has a few interesting adventures along the way. Nicholson does a fine job in his portrayal of Schmidt, a character well suited to his acting style. He spends much of the film in utter disbelief of the events going on around him, which appears to be the way he has spent his entire life. He vows to live out his remaining years to the fullest, like a new years resolution. One might jump quickly to the conclusion that Schmidt considers his life a failure. That may be, but more importantly he realizes that he cannot just turn it all around because he now has that knowledge. He's lived his life a certain way for sixty some odd years and making such a major life change after all that time is not as easy as it sounds. He can dutifully try to live it up in his remaining years but will probably find that he can't, he simply hasn't set his life up for an enjoyable retirement. Many of Schmidt's thoughts are revealed to us through his letters to Ndugu, an impoverished child he "adopts" from a TV charity. He reveals his innermost thoughts to this child, either not knowing or not caring that Ndugu most likely cannot read at all, and would not understand if he could.

The supporting cast also does a fine job. Kathy Bates in particular provides much of the comedic relief as the mother of the clod Schmidt's daughter is marrying. I got a kick out of the scene in which she feeds soup to Schmidt, confined to his bed with neck pain. I could not help but be reminded of her role in Misery, in which she was considerably less compassionate to her "patient".