Bruce Dern and “Nebraska” at the Middleburg Film Festival

Posted on October 25, 2013 at 8:24 am

The opening night of the first Middleburg film festival was held at the spectacular new Salamander Resort and Bruce Dern was there to present his new film, “Nebraska,” directed by Alexander Payne (“Sideways,” “Election,” “The Descendants”). Dern and the film’s producers answered questions following the screening. They told us it took ten years to get it made. Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, the producers, told us that when they received the script from first-time screenwriter Bob Nelson they immediately thought of Alexander Payne and invited him to be executive producer. He said he wanted to direct, but that he had to do another project first, and that turned out to be the multi-year effort on “The Descendants.” They went through several different studios and a budget that “fell through the floor” when they insisted on making it in black and white.

Dern, whose daughter Laura starred in Payne’s first film, “Citizen Ruth,” got the script early and “read it faster than I ever read anything in my life.” Woody, the main character in the film, keeps talking about how much he wants a truck, so Dern sent Payne a red toy truck in a shoebox with a note: “I am Woody.” The character captivated him and he wanted to play it. He said, “It was an at bat for me. I’ve had at bats before, but this one was in the bottom of the ninth.” It was not clear at first that he would get the role. “Every **** in America over 70 they had to look at.”

But then Dern was cast as Woody and he told us how moved he was by what Payne told him. “He said, ‘For the first time in your career, let us do our jobs. Don’t show us anything. Let us find it.'” Payne put his effort into the casting, spending more than a year finding the people, some who had never acted before. Dern got choked up as he described what he said was the hardest scene he had ever filmed, when Woody walks through the now-abandoned house he grew up in. Although, like Woody, he grew up in the Midwest, his background was very different. His family was filled with high achievers in politics, law, and literature and he was told to raise his hand before speaking at dinner because he did not have anything interesting to contribute. Like Woody, he felt a mixture of wistfulness and triumph in thinking about the past.

Dern loved working with Payne, who inspires such loyalty that out of 82 crew members, 47 had been with him on every day of every film he has ever made. “He never gave a specific piece of direction to anyone. When you fall, he goes down where you are, picks you up from the edge, and says, ‘Let’s make magic.'”

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The Descendants

Posted on November 17, 2011 at 6:08 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language including some sexual references
Profanity:	Constant very strong and crude language from adult, teens, and child
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, teen gets drunk, references to teen drug abuse
Violence/ Scariness:	Tragic fatal accident (no graphic images), grief and loss, discussion of taking someone off of life support, sad parental death
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, homophobic insult as evidence of crass, bullying behavior
Date Released to Theaters:	November 16, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	March 13, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004UXUX4Q

Just because he lives in Hawaii, don’t think he’s in paradise, Matt King (George Clooney) warns us. No one is immune to life. The first Alexander Payne film since “Sideways” gives us another damaged hero at a crossroads and as the King whose crown lies very uneasily on his head Clooney gives his most vulnerable and sensitive performance.

Matt’s wife Elizabeth, glimpsed briefly but vibrantly as she is out boating, is in a coma following an accident on the water. “If you’re doing this to get my attention,” he says to himself as much as to her, “it’s working.” All of a sudden he has to pay attention to a lot of things. He’s the one who gets called in to school when his 10-year-old daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) brings in photographs of her mother in a coma for show and tell and the one who has to drive her to apologize after she insults a classmate via text. “I’m the back-up parent,” he tells us, “the understudy.” He was. Now he’s first-string and the game is on the line.

Matt and his family live on his income as a lawyer but everyone knows that he has inherited land of almost unimaginable value and that he is about to decide whether he will sell it for a lot of money or for you-can’t-count-that-high money. The land is owned equally by Matt and his many cousins, all descendants (hence the title) of Hawaiian royalty and the son of missionaries. For legal reasons they cannot continue to hold it indefinitely. For financial reasons, the poorer relatives are pressing to make a deal. But Matt is the sole trustee. He has the authority to decide, and is trying to do what is best for everyone.

He impulsively takes Scottie to pick up his older daughter, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), who has been away at boarding school because of problems with drugs and overall bad behavior. When they arrive, she is out after curfew, drunk, and hostile. At home, she tells him why she was so angry at her mother — Elizabeth was having an affair. And the doctor tells Matt that Elizabeth is deteriorating and there is no hope.

Matt begins to understand how little he knew and how little he has control over. He is clear, methodical, and deliberate on removing Elizabeth from life support, informing her brusque father (an excellent Robert Forster), her mother with dementia (Barbara L. Southern), and their friends and family about what is going on and urging them to visit her to say goodbye. He brings depositions to Elizabeth’s bedside so he can keep working. But in other areas he goes on instinct and impulse, taking Scottie, Alex, and Alex’s dim-witted, awkward boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) to track down Elizabeth’s lover, all of them more sure that they need to do it than they are sure what they will do when they find him.

Alexander Payne (“Election” and “Sideways”) has a gift for life’s messiness, the mash-ups of pain, humor, anger, terror, and longing that collide in the midst of big moments and domestic dailiness. A man wants to get somewhere urgently so finds himself running in shoes that slip and with lungs that no longer let him forget he is getting older. A thoughtless teenager says the wrong thing to a tough old man and gets popped in the eye. There is an awkward encounter with the man who drove the boat in the accident (played by an actor who looks like he has lived his whole life on the beach because it is surfing champion Laird Hamilton).

But moments of grace that come from the wrong people and at the wrong time can still brighten spirits. Payne is also an actor’s director who has consistently given underrated performers a chance to show greater depth and breadth. This film is filled with beautiful performances from Clooney, Woodley, Forster, Matthew Lillard, Beau Bridges, and, as a character who does not even appear until about 3/4 of the way into the movie, the always-wonderful Judy Greer. Too often relegated to best-friend roles for whatever Jennifer and Jessica are in the latest forgettable romantic comedy, Greer is an actress of impeccable honesty and timing. At first her character seems like a nice person who has never needed or wanted to be anything else. But then Greer brings to the small but essential role a dignity and resolve that are unexpectedly touching.

There is a lot of crying in this movie, and not movie crying with one perfect sparkling tear welling up in the corner of one perfect eye. There is some messy, ugly crying. And there is messy, ugly behavior. This is a terrible, painful situation and people are fraught and scared and angry. Matt tells Elizabeth that even in a coma she can still be difficult. But he finds his way to some clarity about some of the problems that were making him feel powerless. And we recognize that acknowledging the messiness may be the closest to clarity anyone can get.

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Cedar Rapids

Posted on February 10, 2011 at 6:00 pm

The day after they invented cities, they invented stories about what happens when country bumpkins arrive in them. The adventures of the innocent in the big, bad metropolis have been popular for centuries. In part that is because of that satisfying moment when the fool from the country ends up outsmarting the sophisticates from the city, the ones who think he is an easy mark. First, though, he has to identify which ones they are. And then he has to identify who he is, and recognize his own strength.

Tim Lippe (“The Office’s” Ed Helms) has spent his life in a tiny Wisconsin town, and almost all of his life working in the small local office of an insurance company. He started working there at age 16. He does not even let himself dream of the success and cosmopolitan elan of Roger Lemke (Thomas Lennon), the office star, who always brings home the coveted Two Diamond top award from the trade association’s annual meeting; he just sincerely wishes him well. But then Roger dies suddenly, and Tim has to take his place at the convention. The boss (Stephen Root) has no time to give him any instruction except to keep away from Dean Zeigler (John C. Reilly), a client poacher, and to win that Two Diamond award at any cost.

Tim takes off for Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after carefully laminating all of his maps. It is only slightly less daunting and terrifying and utterly strange from him than a visit to Mars. He has never been on an airplane. And when a friendly young woman at the hotel doorway (Alia Shawkat of “Arrested Development”) asks him if he’d like to party, he assumes that it’s just the way they welcome people in the big city.

Surprise number one is that the black man in his hotel room is not a criminal, but his roommate, Ronald Wilkes (“The Wire’s” Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a very proper, buttoned-down insurance agent. Surprise number two is that there is a third roommate, none other than the decidedly unbuttoned Zeigler, a loud, hard-drinking, dirty joke-telling cynic and instigator of trouble. With Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche), a very pretty agent from Nebraska who is intent on living it up while she’s away from home, Tim starts to learn some important lessons about his ability to say yes and his ability to say no. And his ability to figure out which is required in a wide variety of unprecedented, unexpected, and highly anxiety-producing circumstances.

As we saw with Helms in “The Hangover,” it is always a lot of fun to see a guy who is tightly wrapped let go — and then to get to see him deal with the consequences. The boss tells Tim that he once thought, “Here’s a kid who’s going to go places,” but then he never did. He goes places and then some in this story. Most of us spend a good bit of time coping with “impostor syndrome, worried that everyone will catch on to our inadequacy. There are a lot of moments of awkwardness and insecurity, but it is heartening to see Tim begin to learn that there is not as big a gulf between him and other people as he thought, even people of exalted rank, and to see him apply what he has learned to get a better understanding of what he thought he knew about the people back home. It benefits from a strong structure, astute depiction of the inevitable corny humor and cheesy networking activities of business gatherings, gutsy performances, and genuine affection for its characters. You will even have a whole new appreciation for insurance. Really. (more…)

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