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"Hot diggity!" you might well say. Well, I warn you: think about this before you run off to buy a ticket and (depending on the depths of your randiness) a pair of binoculars. Watch the trailer all the way through first. Don't worry; go ahead and watch it. I'll wait. Back? Great. Okay, was there anyone in that entire film you'd like to see naked? No, me either. I mean, your best case scenario is a mulleted Dermot Mulroney, and that's not promising. Worst case, this brief nudity may well be that of Kathy Bates, and in the event of this terrifying scenario, I should add that there does not exist nudity brief enough to satisfy me. Ask yourself: Is watching this movie worth the risk of seeing any of the stars nude? About Schmidt is also a book, by the way, written by Louis Begley. People don't read enough anymore. Not having to actually see Kathy Bates starkers is your perfect excuse for starting.The R rating is also the result, we are dutifully warned, of "some language" -- and what does that mean, anyway? Let's give our kids credit for being able to comprehend English. If it were coarse language, I might be leery of letting a child watch; but I'm fully confident that even the under-twelve set can handle the potential trauma of hearing nouns, verbs, subjects, predicates, and even dangling modifiers. But I digress. Our trailer begins with whimsical music, and we see Nicholson in his office watching the clock grimly, willing five o'clock to strike so he can go home. "Say, this movie is about me!" everyone in the theater simultaneously thinks. But they're wrong! It's about Schmidt, we discover, as our protagonist introduces himself in that famous voice: "My name is Warren R. Schmidt."
The voiceover then introduces us to Jeanie, his beloved and recently engaged daughter who, he confides, "could have done a heck of a lot better." If she was looking for the biggest, thickest Village People mustache since the passing of the late, great Leather Man, then I must respectfully disagree. With that mustache, his receding mullet drawn back in a ponytail, and his cheap salesman suit, fiancé Dermot Mulroney looks a little like a scrawny, dark-haired "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan on a job interview. In fact, everyone looks like hell in this trailer, as we see when Schmidt escape marital monotony to visit his daughter to help with the wedding preparations. When I mentioned "nude Kathy Bates," I hope you weren't hoping for her comparatively nubile, sexy character from Misery. The About Schmidt wardrobe department must have collaborated with military scientists to develop and cloak the mother-of-the-groom in a muumuu so frumpy it can instantly blind and demoralize the enemy. And while we're spared the nudity, the trailer drops in a line about how she breast-fed her son until the age of five, in order to sadistically conjure up a mental picture of her withered, pendulous teat. As her husband, the now-grandfatherly Howard Hesseman looks about as much unlike Dr. Johnny Fever as it's possible to look; kind of a Dr. Johnny Mild Chest Cold. Particularly in the late scenes of the trailer, Nicholson himself looks stunned, his hair white and disheveled, as though he's been struck by lightning. Even the apple of Schmidt's eye, his daughter Jeanie (Hope Davis), looks kind of bruised and rotten. Every single cast member, come to talk of it, looks as if they've had every last ounce of hope and joy sucked out of their bodies with a Silly Straw. In other words: hello, About Schmidt! The world's perfect Date Movie! I suppose that if the cast looks this unrepentantly terrible in the trailer, it's evidence of them doing some bang-up acting jobs. If you see a still photo of an actor looking like hell, it just means he got caught by paparazzi on the way to the 7-Eleven to buy cigarettes. But if you see studio-approved footage of an actor looking like hell, it means you're in for some master thespiancraft.
So is Nicholson's performance in About Schmidt good trailer acting? Well, he makes some humorous, befuddled faces, so that's good. Plus, Nicholson's been consistently excellent in the past, so his mere presence in a trailer is almost an instant guarantee of quality (Wolf notwithstanding, although he did bite people in the trailer, which is damned fine trailer acting). He's probably not going to pull out an absurdly long revolver and shoot down any planes, as in Batman, but odds are you'll at least be entertained. It's not like Nicholson's scrounging around for whatever script he can grab, or anything. That's Christian Bale's job. (But I kid Christian Bale.) Also, the trailer wisely makes good use of fellow Oscar-winner Kathy Bates. Like ol' Jack, she's consistently excellent, and it's another safe bet that you'll be entertained by a movie with her in it. (Okay, so she was in Adam Sandler's The Waterboy, but she was also the only watchable thing in it. Actually, isn't Nicholson also in an upcoming Sandler film? What's with Academy Award winners working with Adam Sandler? Maybe they're attempting to surreptitiously banish Sandler's bad-acting demons from him between takes, wielding their Oscars as a priest would a cross. If this is the case, I salute their sacrifice.) At any rate, the
trailer promises lots of bickering, marital ennui, and a crisis of self-examination.
Just like American Beauty, actually -- the trailer even resorts
to using Beauty's soundtrack score. But hell, that was a good
movie. So this one probably is, too. Christian Bale's nowhere to be
seen! (Again, just my little in-joke with Christian. You know I love
you, Balester!) RATING:
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Before
the trailer for About Schmidt starts, do yourself a big favor.
Pay attention to the notification at the beginning, which lets you --
as a theater-goer -- know the movie has been rated R as the result of
"brief nudity".
Since
Nicholson has been more or less playing himself in everything he's done
for the last ten years, this is an encouraging sign that he's going
to actually pretend to be someone else. "I am sixty-six years old
and recently retired," the voiceover continues as we watch Schmidt
shop with, sit alongside on matching Barcaloungers, and finally sit
bolt upright in bed staring in horror at a matronly old housefrau. "Helen
and I have been married 42 years. Lately, I have been asking myself
the same question: Who is the old woman who lives in my house?"
The answer? It's Helen. When you're sixty-six, see, you don't want to
challenge yourself too much anymore.
Good
thing too, since About Schmidt is being positioned as an Oscar
vehicle for Nicholson. It looks like he's doing some fine, terrible-looking
film acting here, but the question is: is it good trailer acting? In
a trailer, there's no time for a subtle, nuanced character study, and
that's not the goal of trailer acting anyway. The goal is to get asses
in theater seats. Good trailer acting is Nicholson angrily screaming
"You can't handle the truth!" at thunderous volume in A
Few Good Men, or cutting up victims with funny, savagely cruel insults
in As Good As It Gets, or chopping through a door with an axe
and snarling, "Here's Johnny" with insane glee in The Shining.
Good trailer acting goes for the visceral reaction. It doesn't try to
make you think. It jolts your primitive lizard brain into immediately
and irrationally shouting "I go see now!" instead of trying
to convince your more cerebral grey matter that, if you extrapolate
sixty-fold, the level of intelligence and acting in the two-minute trailer
you're watching will be directly proportional to that contained in the
two-hour film it advertises.