About Schmidt


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"

Jack Nicholson became a star a little over 30 years ago through his unforgettable appearances as social rebels in two road movies - the drunken lawyer picked up by the hippie bikers in Easy Rider and the middle-class dropout working as an oilfield rigger in Five Easy Pieces. In About Schmidt, he returns to the road movie at the age of 65 to give one of his greatest performances as a repressed conformist undergoing experiences he doesn't wholly comprehend.

His character, Warren Schmidt, is facing the consequences of mandatory retirement from his job as vice-president and actuary with an insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska, Midwestern home town of Marlon Brando, and best known for its abattoirs and for lending its name to the most blood-drenched beach of the Normandy landings.

The movie has about it the same tone that its director and co-scriptwriter, Alexander Payne, brought to his bitter high-school comedy, Election, also set in Omaha, something you might call an unsentimental realism or a bracing misanthropy. It is like a funnier version of the Merchant-Ivory picture Mr and Mrs Bridge, where Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward played an equally conventional Kansas City lawyer and his wife.

We first see Warren Schmidt sitting in his office, the walls stripped of pictures, his files packed in boxes, a briefcase on his empty desk. Blank-eyed, he's watching the clock as the second hand advances to 5pm and his departure from the Woodmen Insurance Company. But before he embarks on his years of 'third-age' freedom, he has to go through the awful ritual of a farewell dinner with hilariously terrible speeches from an old colleague and his glib, young successor.

Schmidt is a man with an unhappy inner self, but no supportive inner life other than that provided by the conventions and values of middle-class middle America. His chosen profession as actuary has taught him to take a few essential facts and predict anyone's death to the nearest year. But actuaries can be surprised.
Schmidt, who's been married for 42 years, has disclosed to the audience how much his homely, overweight wife gets on his nerves ('Who is this old woman who lives in my house?'). Suddenly, she dies and he realises how dependent on her he was. Then he discovers a cache of love letters written to her by his best friend 30 years before and goes berserk, throwing away her clothes and possessions and assaulting the friend in public.

Incapable of remaining at home, he takes off for Denver, some 500 miles or so to the west where his only child, the peevish, alienated Jeannie (Hope Davis) is shortly to marry a cheesy waterbed salesman, Randall (Dermot Mulroney), of whom he disapproves.
When she shows little enthusiasm for his early arrival, he embarks on a sentimental journey to the town where he was born and to the campus of his alma mater, Kansas State University. His vehicle is a ludicrously unsuitable mobile home, a 35ft Winnebago Adventurer, the size of a bus, bought by his wife for retirement journeys. It emphasises his loneliness.

The movie isn't like one of those determinedly heartbreaking pictures about old widowers (usually played by Walter Matthau or Art Carney) wandering around in search of sympathy. It's nearer to an American version of Ikuru, Kurosawa's masterly study of an elderly civil servant nearing death who finds something to redeem a seemingly worthless life. In the Japanese film, the hero manages to create a small children's park. In Payne's film, Schmidt is attracted by a TV appeal to send $22 a month to support a six-year-old orphan in Tanzania, and it is the letters he's invited to send to little Ndugu that reveal Schmidt's thoughts and provide the voiceover commentary. The letters wittily expose the discrepancy between the real world and what Schmidt perceives, and reveal the limitations of his mental horizons, not least in the blinkered expectations of what a child in an East African village might grasp about American life.

These revelations are often cruel, but they serve to offset and balance the fastidious, uptight Schmidt's disdain for most people he meets. This is rather different to the ironic contempt so often shown by characters Nicholson plays. Payne has a remarkable eye and ear for the banalities of everyday life; he pins down a middle-class couple also travelling in a motor-home, through their jaunty use of nautical jargon ('Ahoy there, can I come aboard?'), and makes us wince at the string of clichés that constitute the speech of Schmidt's new son-in-law.

But the coarse, boozy, blue-collar bohemianism of the family his daughter is marrying into is shown to be, for all its vulgarity, more vital and sexually liberated than Schmidt's bourgeois suburbia. Payne compels us both to share Schmidt's distaste for his daughter's uninhibited mother-in-law (Kathy Bates) and to recognise her earthy vitality.

At the end, Nicholson brings off, quite brilliantly, a wedding speech, every word of which we know to be insincere, if not necessarily untrue, but which is intended to heal, console and make life bearable. But nothing around him can match the imaginary bond established with Ndugu, the six-year-old African boy who cannot read the heartfelt letters Schmidt sends him.


abattoir rzeźnia
actuary rzeczoznawca zakładu ubezpieczeniowego (sprawdza rozmiar i charakter szkód)
to assault zaatakować, napaść na
bearable - znośny
(to go) berserk - wściec się, stracić nad sobą kontrolę,
blank-eyed o pustym wzroku, patrząc bezmyślnie
Bohemia - cyganeria artystyczna
boozy - podpity
bracing misanthropy - orzeźwiająca (ożywcza) mizantropia (niechęć do ludzi)
cheesy - nudny, banalny, słodyczkowaty
cliché - stereotyp, wyświechtana opinia
coarse - grubiański, nieokrzesany, prostacki
to console - pocieszyć
contempt - pogarda, wzgarda
to disclose - wyjawić, ujawnić
discrepancy - rozbieżność
disdain - lekceważenie
distaste - niesmak
dropout - ktoś, kto rzuca szkołę przed jej ukończeniem lub ktoś, kto prowadzi niezwykły tryb życia
to embark on sth - rozpocząć coś, przedsięwziąć coś (dosł: wejść na statek)
fastidious- wybredny, wymyślny, grymaśny
glib - łatwo się wysławiający, elokwentny
hand tu: wskazówka od zegarka
hilarious bardzo śmieszny
inner self - wnętrze,
jaunty - beztroski,
ludicrously - absurdalnie, niedorzecznie
mandatory - obowiązkowy, obligatoryjny
to match - dorównać
nautical - związany z żeglarstwem, żeglarski
to offset - wynagrodzić, wyrównać stratę, rónoważyć
oilfield rigger - specjalista od spraw takielunku na tankowcach
peevish - drażliwy, zrzędny
to pin down - dosł: przyszpilić, uchwycić charakterystyczną cechę
rebel - buntownik
to redeem - odkupić, wybawić, ocalić, zbawić
repressed - zamknięty w sobie
successor- następca, spadkobierca
to take off - wyjechać, nagle opuścić jakieś miejsce
uninhibited - nieskrępowany, bezpośredni
voiceover - głos z offu
to wince - krzywić się
wittily - dowcipnie, witty- dowcipny


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