And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
"Nebraska" is full of complicated people marked by flaws and failures, mistakes and regrets; they can be selfish bastards, too. It often feels as though Payne is trying to strip away the cliché that the region is populated exclusively by hardworking, decent hearted types, But for all the cragginess Woody exudes with his etched face and mess of white hair, he has also inspired a great deal of love in this director. The film's starkly beautiful final images have a poignancy that might leave a lump in your throat.
The movie focuses on the pathetic, quixotic quest of Woody Grant, a senile and alcohol-addled Korean War veteran. Woody is not only foolish enough to believe he's won a million dollars from one of those sweepstakes letters that the rest of us customarily toss in the trash, he's also insistent on collecting his winnings personally.
We first meet Woody trudging bow-leggedly up the highway, wandering through traffic, apparently intent on walking the 750 miles to collect his winnings. Returned home by the police, Woody sets straight out again on his pilgrimage, despite his family's insistence that there is no pot of gold waiting for him at the end of this scam mail-marketing rainbow. Eventually his harassed son David (Will Forte) decides it's safer to just drive the old fool to Lincoln, and so they hit the road, stopping en route in Woody's old home town of Hawthorne, where a careless word about their mission makes him the subject of local gossip, celebrity and (inevitably) greed.
David seems like one of the good guys. A single and struggling electronics salesman, he trudges along in work and in life. He and his father aren't terribly close because Woody isn't terribly close to anyone; family is the expected phenomenon that just sort of formed around him at some point. But when Woody keeps pressing to pick up his prize money, David sees an opportunity to spend some time together, and maybe even enjoy some long-overdue father-son bonding. So they hop in David's car, to the frustration and disgust of Woody's loyal and long-suffering wife, Kate, played by scene-stealer June Squibb. Don't let this woman's diminutive size and frumpy wardrobe fool you: she is a formidable force, a foulmouthed voice of reason.
This is a rare film that Payne directed but didn't help write—the script comes from Bob Nelson—but it nevertheless allows the filmmaker to return to his home state, which was also the setting for the high school satire "Election" and the road movie "About Schmidt." The sense of place is unshakable. "Nebraska" is shot in bleak black-and-white by Payne's frequent cinematographer Phedon Papamichael ("Sideways," "The Descendants"). It's a choice that highlights the story's prevailing sense of melancholy and decay rather than trying to impose a cloying nostalgia.
"Processed in grainy black and white (the crisp digital image has been degraded to approximate arcane monochrome celluloid) and owing a tonal debt to David Lynch's sentimental road movie The Straight Story, Nebraska tunes its bittersweet "personal journey" riffs to the plaintive waltz of picked guitars and lyrical fiddles, played out against a backdrop of fading midwest towns and long, lonesome interstates."
He is a master of "cringe comedy" that hurts as much as it amuses. He captures the awkwardness of real life, where sad moments are often interrupted by the mundane or the ridiculous.
Script: This was the first film directed by Alexander Payne that he did not write himself. Bob Nelson, a former sketch comedian, wrote the script based on his own experiences with his father.
Casting: Bruce Dern was cast against type; known for playing "nutjobs" and villains, here he plays a man defined by fragility and melancholia. Will Forte, primarily known for Saturday Night Live, surprised critics with his grounded, dramatic performance.
The Decline of the American Heartland
The fictional town of Hawthorne serves as a microcosm of rural decay. The film captures the "brain drain" of the Midwest, where the young have left for cities (like David and Ross), leaving behind a landscape of empty storefronts and elderly residents who communicate in brief, stoic sentences.
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