Nicholson's Film About a Hollow Man Full of Meaning

My friend and I recently attended a church service as the guests of a couple in a small group Bible study we’d been attending. The study was on Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life, and the church had integrated the study into its services. The week we went, the topic was evangelism, and the sermon concerned reaching out to others outside the Christian community and sharing your faith with them. It concluded with the final scene in About Schmidt, a film I had been wanting to see but still hadn’t yet. Although the scene did not so much illustrate the importance of evangelism, it did demonstrate how the human need for a feeling of purpose is best fulfilled by an assurance that our lives have made a difference to someone else, even if it is just one person. A few days ago, my friend and I watched the movie together, and while much of it was rather dreary and depressing, I ultimately found the film very moving.

This is the movie that afforded us all those glamorous shots of Jack Nicholson looking like something the cat dragged in and promptly ran away from. He’s looking awfully rough here, and with good reason. Warren Schmidt (Nicholson) is a man doomed to the realization that he is 66 years old with nothing to show for it. He retires from a lifelong job at an insurance company, placated by the platitudes heaped on him by a longtime coworker and the young man replacing him. But when he accepts the upstart’s invitation to return to the office and give him a few pointers, he receives the royal brush-off and spies his life’s work sitting in boxes on the curb for the trash man to pick up. He’d looked forward to a cozy retirement with his wife, Helen, traveling around the country in their cushy mobile home, but now that he’s home with her all the time he finds all of her idiosyncrasies intolerable. When Helen (June Squibb) dies suddenly, his marital apathy leaves him with a load of guilt that is only eased when he discovers that years ago, she had an affair with the friend who so eloquently toasted him at the retirement banquet.

So begins a quest of self-discovery that will last throughout the course of the movie. Feeling betrayed, rejected and useless, Warren embarks on a road trip, revisiting the sites of his early life and hoping to rekindle some forgotten memories. But everywhere he goes, it seems life has gone on with no record of his existence. He feels utterly obsolete. Even his beloved daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis), about to be wed to a waterbed salesman, Randall (Dermott Mulroney), of whom Warren disapproves, rejects him, and Warren must sit idly by and watch as his daughter marries into an oddball family and out of her father’s life.

Everything in the film points to the emptiness that consumes Warren. The sparse score adds to film’s overall mood of uneasy quietude. Warren himself is largely silent. He appears to be passive-aggressive, always careful not to ruffle any feathers but inwardly seething about the unfairness of his life. This isn’t to say that he is a wholly admirable character. He is very self-centered and used to being taken care of. He doesn’t have the nasty streak displayed by many of Nicholson’s characters, but he also lacks Nicholson’s abundant charm. He’s a hollow man who only truly opens up and allows himself his full range of emotions in his letters to Ndugu, a young African boy he decides to sponsor. Along with 22 dollars a week, he sends the child poignant reflections and virulent rants that the audience hears in voiceover while observing Warren’s activities.

Nicholson is fantastic as the disenfranchised Warren, a decent everyman who feels his life is devoid of meaning. He truly carries the film. Although it is clear Warren despises Randall, I thought Mulroney made the character very likable. A bit of a do-nothing, perhaps, but a very nice guy who loves Warren’s daughter and is always pleasant to Warren in spite of the latter’s thinly veiled hostility. Davis, meanwhile, seemed to go out of her way to make Jeannie unlikable, perhaps to emphasize Warren’s shaky grasp of reality. His sweet little girl is gone, never to return as far as we can tell. Also worth note is Kathy Bates as Roberta, Randall’s libidinous mother, whose much-ballyhooed hot tub encounter with Warren is brief but uncomfortably hilarious. Howard Hesseman, meanwhile, provides humor as Randall’s easy-going, speech-making father, Larry.

But perhaps the real star of the movie is the one who never appears at all, the unseen foil to Warren’s tortured soul. Somewhere on the other side of the world is a little boy named Ndugu who can’t read but understands that Warren Schmidt cares enough to send him money and write him letters. Warren lives a privileged life that is full of disappointments; Ndugu is an orphan who resides in a state of poverty but feels rich because his life has been touched by this hollow man. About Schmidt is a sad movie about a broken man, but perhaps this one-sided correspondence is just enough to help Warren’s emptiness heal.