#NEBRASKA: A Pygmy Review:

When I lived in Europe, I took pictures of towering cathedrals, imposing castles and sumptuous palaces. But when I visited Africa, there were no cathedrals or castles or palaces. There were only people. People with faces as beautiful and as unique and as varied and as odd as any structure in Europe. "Nebraska," the new film by Alexander Payne ("Sideways," "The Descendants"), is like Africa in that respect. It is a cinematic container of mixed nuts. It takes place, not in the steel and glass canyons of New York, or the sun drenched boulevards of Los Angeles, but on the dull, ordinary streets of Montana and Nebraska. (The film is shot in luscious black and white, a medium generally used to accentuate grand vistas of breathtaking contrast, but here used to profile the vast, open, sparse, unadorned plains of middle America).

"Nebraska," endowed with some of the same quirkiness as the Coen Bros.' "Fargo," perfectly captures small-town simplicity, and the challenges inherent to it. Its central character, Woody Grant, has, like everyone we meet, lived a straightforward, unembellished life, bereft of any highs, but burdened down with far too many lows. Woody's embarrassingly mistaken belief, that he has won a million dollars and has only to travel to Lincoln, Nebraska, to claim it, is only the second thing in his many years with the ability to shatter the sodden ordinary (the Korean war, when he was far younger than his youngest son, David, is now, was the first). David comes to recognize this, and so embarks on a road trip that is to forever change how he sees his father. As children, we perceive our elders as if they are frozen in amber, as if they were always old. "Nebraska" shows that these people, gnarled by time, covered with frosty manes, sagging here and there, have histories overflowing with youth, mischief, vibrancy and half-buried secrets. The people we think we know the best, and may have judged the harshest, just might not be anything like what we thought.

Payne has made a career out of being a director of finely realized characters. Bruce Dern's face is so familiar to us, but within minutes he melts into the general population; he is so good and so natural that we come to see him as one of the terrific non-actors that populate great swaths of the film. Will Forte, known for his years on "Saturday Night Live," is perfect precisely because we need someone who can, with just a look, reflect the utter absurdity of the situation. Stacy Keech, largely absent from film these days, comes out of nowhere, making his appearance all the more delicious. June Squibb, as Woody's long-suffering, opinionated wife, is revelatory.

It strikes me that these brief words just might make "Nebraska" seem tedious as hell. It is not. It is a delight. I have not laughed out loud more in any film this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT5tqPojMtg

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