In 1974, Woody Grant lent an air compressor to his buddy Ed Pegram for a project he was working on. Forty years later the compressor is still outstanding, to which Woody doesn't hold a grudge, even though it's clear Ed Pegram stole it.
This is Woody's biggest character flaw: he sees goodness in everyone. After all, he reasons, Ed just forgot to return it and one day he'll get a knock at the door and there Ed will be with his air compressor and all will be right with the universe. It's a rosy view, but, of course, an impossible one.
Woody, the central figure in Alexander Payne's utterly beautiful new movie Nebraska, is played by veteran actor Bruce Dern, who turns in one of the most wholly original performances of the year as he squints and wanders, sighs and stares ambivalently into space, and slowly shrugs through the twilight of his life.
Woody is a drunk and, possibly, delusional. He receives one of those phony "You already won $1 Million!!!" sweepstakes letters in the mail and he thinks he actually won something. The letter says to call or mail it back, but then he would have to entrust the United States Postal Service with his precious loot, so one day he begins hoofing it from Montana down to Nebraska, where the sweepstakes company is located.
He can't seem to get out of town, though. In the opening scene a sheriff's deputy stops him on an overpass. "Where you going?" the deputy asks. Woody points in front of him. "Where you coming from?" says the deputy. Woody points behind him. The guy's a regular chatterbox. After several failed walking attempts, Woody's son, David (Will Forte) agrees to drive his dad to Nebraska if only to indulge the old man's fantasy, as brief as it may be. "He needs something to live for, and maybe this is it," David tells his older brother.
So off Woody and David go on a road trip unlike anything I've ever quite seen. David tries to patch up their botched family history, but Woody is so vacant that he primarily stares out the window, his eye always limp and moping, "Are we in Nebraska yet?" At one point Woody loses his teeth in a trainyard, they meet up with some even-more-vacant relatives and, during a stop at Mt. Rushmore, Woody offers a daring critique of the stone monument that, if broadcast on a national level, would decrease park attendance in such a way that it might do serious harm to the National Parks Service.
The road trip makes an extended detour in Woody's hometown, where his brother and his wife — and their two mouth-breathing adult children — set them up for a couple of days. All these characters unite in a brilliant scene inside the brother's living room, where Mouth Breather and Neck Beard razz David about his driving speed. The sequence is punctuated by long bouts of silence as all the characters listen, pause, think, pause, react, pause. It's as if brains move a little slower in this house.
Now, let me detour myself a little bit: this movie reminds me greatly of John Hillcoat's The Road, based on the Cormac McCarthy book about a father and a son traveling south to escape an inescapable apocalypse. That movie and this one share a common trait: it's about fathers. But where The Road was about a father imparting wisdom and goodness onto his son, this one seems to be the obvious flip-side of that theme. It's about a father and a son on a journey south, and the son is setting the example for the father.
I loved Bruce Dern here, but I think Nebraska's secret weapon really is Forte, who does something quite remarkable — and gentle and kind and moving and selfless — in the film's final act. Another secret weapon is June Squibb as Woody's wife, June. She's a prickly little cuss, and she knows it. She joins the expedition late in the journey, but she'll leave you in stitches with every one of her quotable lines. When asked if she milked cows on the farms, she says, "I ain't fiddlin' with no cow titties. I'm a city girl." On a trip to a cemetery, she recognizes a name on the tombstone: "He was always trying to get in my panties," she says. then she turns to the grave, flips up her skirt and hollers, "Here's what you're missin'!" If Squibb doesn't get an Oscar nomination for this hilarious role, then there is no justice in the movie business.
The movie, filled with the shattered and aging remnants of Americana's golden age — Last Picture Show all grow'd up — answers the sweepstakes question fully, but the sub-plot to follow is the one with the air compressor. And wouldn't you know it, Woody runs into Ed Pegram, a slimy slug of a man, who preys on Woody's kindness and gullibility. The man brings out the worst in Woody, and the best in David, and they end up uniting, if only to screw Ed Pegram over in a way that should have happened decades earlier.
This is one of the best written, most marvelously well acted and most focused movies of the year. And even though Nebraska's flatness is barely picturesque and the entire film is shot in black and white, the composition and cinematography are spectacular.
And back to that damned air compressor: if there was ever a modern-day equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock's MacGuffin then here it is. Everyone wants it, yet it serves no purpose to the plot, other than Woody wants it back. One way or another, Ed Pegram is going to relinquish it, whether he knows it or not. Such is life.
