Nebraska (second thoughts)

The great French director, Robert Bresson, made most of his films using non-professional actors. Bresson counseled his performers to show no emotion, to avoid any semblance of "acting", to treat the camera as if it were an intimidating enemy -- be impassive, disclose nothing. Whether this strategy is completely successful in Bresson's films is impossible for me to ascertain -- the movies are subtitled and the actors speak in French and I have no idea whether their intonations and prosody ring true to people who know that language. (If French critics can be believed, Bresson's direction of his non-actor actors is impeccable.) Many of the performers in Alexander Payne's "Nebraska", a film that I have earlier considered, are apparently non-professionals or semi-professional Midwestern thespians -- summer-stock and community theater actors. A second viewing of the film confirms something that I felt on first watching the movie in the theater -- the minor players and secondary characters, often, seem subtly inauthentic; there is something stilted about the way that these characters read their lines. Indeed, we often have the sense that the secondary characters are, in fact, reciting their parts. The dialogue, as written, is impeccably Midwestern, understated, and blunt. People from Nebraska (and I was born there) are plain-spoken and the women, in particular, have ranch-wife sensibility -- they don't mince words, can seem rude, swear frequently, and are startlingly candid about family history and sex. I thought this aspect of the film was truthful, but the performers often seemed slightly abashed -- again, this is an aspect of Midwestern self-effacement: many of the minor roles in the film are played by people who seem slightly embarrassed to be on-camera and there is a hesitancy and very slight over-inflection in their speech. The prosody isn't quite right. I wonder if these folks aren't over-directed and if it wouldn't be better for them to try to avoid acting at all. This defect in the film seems most notable in scenes in which people are supposed to express sentimental or friendly feelings or trying to be ingratiating. None of the minor characters have much difficulty expressing rancor, bitterness, or hostility. On second viewing, it also seems to me that Will Forte's character as the solicitous son is muted to the point of implausibility, although the actor's performance is effective and his mournful physiognomy is central to the picture's grim landscapes and funereal tone. Although these defects in the film are more evident, and, perhaps, irritating on second viewing -- this is a picture we would accept more warmly if it were spoken in German or Croatian and subtitled -- the movie is powerful and lingers in the imagination. In fact, the film is sufficiently disturbing that it triggers disquieting and morose two a.m. reflections, the sort of brooding that occupies the mind when you can't sleep and dawn is still four hours away. Bruce Dern's Woody Grant is plausible as a man whose whole life has been something like a steel trap. His ceaseless attempts to escape his family -- although motivated by the plot about the million dollar prize money offered in Lincoln -- arise from a lifetime of imprisonment interrupted periodically by panicked flight. Apparently, Grant's marriage was always unhappy and he had no interest in his boys or being a family man. We learn that he has become a drunk partly to elude his unhappy marriage, that he once had an affair "with a half-breed on the reservation" and planned to leave his wife, but that, apparently, the birth of Will Forte's character, "a beautiful baby...a little prince" as he is described, sealed his entrapment. Presumably, Grant returned to his family when his wife was pregnant with their second child and, then, made another attempt at escape -- this time leaving Hawthorne, Nebraska and his obligations in that place for Billings, Montana. Grant is a man who has spent his life trying to avoid destiny -- he fled his family farm, presumably, because he couldn't accept the tyranny of working the land for his father, went to Korea, married unhappily, tried and failed to escape that marriage, fled his home-town only to fail in another place. In the context of this biography, the low-key happy ending that Payne imposes on the story seems specious. Woody Grant's exodus across the barren high-plains has nothing to do with securing a legacy for his sons (as he says at one point) or acquiring a truck: it's like Tolstoy's desperate and hysterical flight from his wife in the last weeks of his life, a last-ditch effort to escape what he has always been.