Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards Tuesday, one short of “12 Years a Slave,” the leading contender. Bob Nelson, who wrote Payne’s road movie, was placed in the Best First Screenplay category, as opposed to Best Screenplay. If there’s any justice, the script by the 57-year-old former TV writer and actor from South Dakota will eventually make the cut for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
Written in 2002 and optioned by Payne in 2003, as reported by The Huffington Post, Nelson’s story sends the dyspeptic geezer Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) and his patient youngest son, David (Will Forte), from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska. Woody’s attempt to collect the million dollars he deludes himself he has won in a direct-mail scam is an obvious Hitchcockian MacGuffin.
The trip, on which they are joined by the tart-tongued matriarch, Kate (June Squibb), and David’s more successful brother, Ross (Bob Odenkirk), isn’t a wild goose chase, however. It enables David and the old man to bond in surprising ways as a result of what transpires when the family visits the small Nebraska town it had left years before. David and Ross’s relationship also changes in a priceless scene involving the theft of an air compressor. And David begins to break with his inertia and meekness.
Ultimately, though, “Nebraska” is a character study of Woody that slowly unveils why he is a taciturn drunk and a bottomless well of wounded pride and disappointment, whose appearance of near-catatonia may be explained by his preoccupation with the past. Where has he gone in his mind when David tries to alert him to something happening in the present?
The power of Nelson’s script lies in its “reveals” about Woody at different stages in his life — a series of mostly offhand disclosures (though one is malicious) — that tell David why his father was a closed-off parent during his and Ross’s upbringing and what shaped him into the man he has become. Some of these disclosures carry the story back into the 1930s and invoke the faces and behavior of long-dead people.
Two bombs are dropped, ever so gently, by the kind old newspaper woman, Peg Nagy, played so memorably by Angela McEwan, whom David visits on his own. Because the reveals are so precious, I will allude to only one of them here and in vague terms.
Peg, Woody’s high-school sweetheart, privately tells David why her relationship with his dad didn’t last, using a euphemism one wouldn’t have expected her to use. Her admission not only offers insight into the Woody and Peg of circa 1950, but offers something crucial about one of the other characters. Suddenly, the film has entered “a land of lost content,” directly equivalent to that of Sonny, Jacy, and Duane before the death of Sam the Lion and the Korean War in “The Last Picture Show” (1971).
This is screenwriting so subtle and so layered it endows “Nebraska” with a novelistic depth.
Read J. Hoberman’s “Nebraska” review here and my thoughts on Will Forte’s performance here.
