About Schmidt

A dark comedy that's as emotionally honest as any picture of 2002. Read full review

Ever the satirist, Payne mines humor from his characters, be it Randall's cockeyed pyramid-scheme ideas or the banality of a ridiculous wedding toast. Read full review

Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers. Read full review

A quiet, heart-rending masterpiece, one with an actor's turn that people will remember, and rediscover, eons into the future. Read full review

What makes this exquisitely observed slice of American screen realism transcend itself is finally its moral sensibility. Read full review

This powerfully contained, painfully funny performance has to rank with the greatest work Nicholson's ever done -- This road movie gives you emotional whiplash, and you’ll be glad you went along for the ride. Read full review

What gives About Schmidt its ultimate boost, what pushes it into the stirring heavens is Nicholson, who produces the most understated -– and one of the most powerful –- performances of his career. Read full review

The bleakness and poignancy are inescapable in About Schmidt, a character study that has the emotional richness of the great Italian and Eastern European films of the 1960s, in which humor and pathos rode up and down on the seesaw together. Read full review

A comedy poised on the knife's edge of tragedy, the film is a gutsy, truthful, deeply rooted vision of contemporary American life, scaled to the size of an ordinary man. It's a humanist triumph strip-mined of bathos and confirmation that, after directing just three features, Payne has become the most gifted comic social satirist to hit our movies since Preston Sturges. Read full review

What makes About Schmidt so extraordinary is how ordinary its tale is; it's a gray picture about gray people looking for some kind of meaning in their gray lives. Read full review

Payne achieves an impressive control over the look and tone, so that, melancholy as the movie is, it comes off as both comedy and comment on the human condition. Read full review

It is also Nicholson at his bravest and riskiest. By banking his fires and staying alert to the smallest details, he delivers a monumental performance that blasts your expectations and batters your heart. Read full review

A seriously good movie, a challenge to viewers, a rebuke of the way many Americans live their lives. Read full review

This is a superb film and one of Nicholson's great performances, tamped down but magnetic. Read full review

The power of this great movie -- part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, mostly masterpiece -- is in the details. Read full review

Sublime and sorrowful movie. Read full review

As sad and poignant and potentially hopeful as it is amusing. The movie is our story as much as it is Schmidt's, no matter if it's viewed as a self-reflection or cautionary tale Read full review

There's still nothing quite as thrilling on the screen as the spectacle of an icon movie star in a perfectly tailored role. Read full review

We laugh, yes, but we're touched, too, a delicate balance that the film manages again and again, right through to its bittersweet conclusion. Read full review

Payne, the great satirist behind "Citizen Ruth" and "Election," loves to populate his films with throwaway details, which in About Schmidt accumulate into a portrait of Midwestern life that's almost chilling in its exactitude. Read full review

This is where Payne shines. Schmidt’s Winnebago journey through America’s heartland is more like a personal voyage into his Heart of Darkness. Read full review

About Schmidt is billed as a comedy. It is funny to the degree that Nicholson is funny playing Schmidt, and funny in terms of some of his adventures, but at bottom it is tragic. Read full review

The movie isn't just about Schmidt as a personality, it's a portrait of his world, and Payne and co-writer Taylor show a rare compassion for the superficially comfortable. Read full review

Nicholson has at least three magnificent moments in Hour 2. The best is a wedding toast that comes after another that will painfully remind you of every banal wedding toast you've ever heard. Read full review

Stands as a poignant marker in the career of a major artist. Read full review

One may not realize how truly sad this movie is until the forlorn final moments, when Payne resists an inspirational closer, and, with exquisite tact, averts his eyes. Read full review

Films exist for different reasons, and the indisputable raison d'etre for About Schmidt is to showcase Jack Nicholson giving a master class in the art of screen acting. Read full review

How you feel about About Schmidt may depend in large part on how you feel About Jack. Read full review

A must-see for Nicholson's mesmerizing performance, which would probably hold interest even if the sound were turned off. Read full review

I recommend the movie both for Nicholson's performance and for the opportunity to spend some time with the kind of man that we often meet in real life, but rarely see on screen. Read full review

Nicholson makes the movie so poignant that it's hard to resist, but I wonder if Payne and Taylor are rejecting the skeptical attitudes of their other films to become more popular, hoping a softer emotional tone will help this picture win the Oscars that have eluded their more tough-minded works. Read full review

Much more deserving of plaudits is the secondary cast--Hope Davis as Schmidt's resentful daughter, Dermot Mulroney as the waterbed salesman she's engaged to, and, above all, Kathy Bates in a hilarious turn as the latter's New Age mother. Read full review

The pathos of About Schmidt -- of the careful, Chekhovian work that it could have been --gradually slides away. [16 December 2002, p. 106]

This ambitious, entertaining movie, which showed at film festivals earlier this year, has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece worthy of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman or Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt. Yet its social comments are stained by condescension, and its uplift is sustained by sentimentality that Mr. Nicholson's prickly Everyman can't conceal.

It’s the difference between artistry and knowingness. About Schmidt doesn’t bring us deeply into the lives of its people because it’s too busy trying to feel superior to them. Read full review

The writing is sharp and often blithely cynical, although not above using a shooting star to put a lump in the throat. The tone, however, is at times dangerously uncertain. Read full review

Payne's movie is flat, depressed, and at times -- given this director's talent -- disappointingly curdled; it needs every quivering molecule of Nicholson's repressed rage to keep it alive and humming. Read full review

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck. Read full review

The truth is About Schmidt offers only the sporadic laugh, the less frequent original cultural insight and, at best, a craftsmanlike performance from its aging headliner. The truth is there are long stretches in the picture that are unequivocally dull. Read full review

Had Payne the grace or generosity to present the vulgarity and naiveté and tackiness of these characters as something vital and endearing and delightful, the movie might have been explosively funny. Read full review