About Schmidt

A moving story full of life.

Warren Schmidt is a 60-year-old man who has just retired. His life is not as satisfying as he had ever desired. Warren has just retired and he has nothing to do with her boring and depressing life. Worse, Warren’s only daughter Jeannie is about to marry Randall Hertzel, a non-desirable men and Warren tries to persuade Jeannie (Hope Davies) against her will.

When his undesirable wife dies, Jack Nicholson playing Schmidt realices that the issues of life and death go through life in the same trivializing way and his life undergo a sea change. He has to take decision on his problem and decides to sponsor a 6-year-old orphan child in Tanzania. Warren takes a journey alone in his new Winnebago Van from Nebraska to Denver, where his daughter is going to get married.

The closest correspondence between Warren Schmidt and Ndugu Umbu, his sponsored child, reveals the feelings Warren experiences during his van journey, when Warren faces meeting strangers, surprises, comic situations as well as bittersweet moments.

Director Alexander Payne shows the spectator through this often-funny drama about isolation the way Warren’s travel is a metaphor of his real life, the way he is destined for lifelong failures, humiliations and frustrations.

When Warren meets Randall’s peculiar mother in Denver, they start an uncommon relation that makes him to accept his daughter’s decision to marry Randall.

While writing letters to Ndugu and telling him questions that have accomplished him in life, Warren begins to catch a glimpse of what he has always been. He laments that his life has never made difference to anyone, that he has never highlighted among others, that he has never made difference for others.

Warren has anybody that accompanies him in his solitude, but one day, he receives a letter from Ndugu with a picture showing two smiling figures knocking their fingers in a sunny day.

Film Reviews

Adaptation, 2002, Spike Jonze

Always cynical, insecure and with a inferiority complex, the acknowledge screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) has already been given the task of writing a new screenplay based on writer Susan Orlean’s  non-fiction book, “The orchid Thief”.

3 years ago, Florida. Susan Orlean has been suggested to write an article about John Laroche. When they meet each other, his character fascinates Susan, as excentric Laroche has a free, open, tolerant spirit. In spite of his emotional security, he has had to put up with the death of his mother, a divorce and his owns being destroyed by Hurricane Andrew.   Now he works with Seminoles thanks to his vast knowledge of flowers and orchid poaching. 

On the other hand, unhappy and wretch Susan finds in the orchid thief the way to escape from all her problems, the charm of a free being without prejudices nor ties that ends up pushing her to a net of ruin and tragedy.

Charlie Kaufman tries hard to adapt Susan’s book while he’s going through a bad time, facing a personal crisis that get worse with his brother’s attitude. Despite being twins, Donald Kaufman is the very antithesis of Charlie, though they are both screenwriters. Always self-confident Donald faces life with an entrepreneurial spirit and a positive attitude towards life whose screenplays are not as fabulous as Charlie’s but attract better public’s attention.  Donald having success and the incapacity of turning the book into a film makes that Charlie blocks.

The director of such a fabulous creation, Spike Jonze, succeed in attracting spectators showing a film inside another film, creating a movie where Charlie Kaufman is writing the screenplay of the film that we are seeing.  The director manage to making known three stories at the same time, Kaufman and his twin writing the script, Susan Orlean writing the book and John Laroche being  the main character of Susan’s book and achieve that the spectator don’t lose the plot.

The duality between both Charlie and Donald/Susan and Laroche is also reflected in the plot division, where Jonze try to make the first half of the film more of a comedy but takes a turn to make the second part more of a drama, more of a tragic film with a surprise ending that live no one indifferent.

Road to perdition, 2002, Sam Mendes

Revenge, payback, retribution, retaliation, vengeance or simply justice.

What does lead a man to act in this way?

1931, Mike Sullivan, a parent of a good family living in USA works for the Irish mafia in Rock Island. His employer, John Rooney provides him and his family stability and a good social status in exchange for killing people.

But this idyllic life changes when Sullivan’s son discovers his father for who he really is. After Sullivan’s family being killed, he and his oldest son manage to flee their home and start from scratch.

Making their way to Chicago is not easy at all, but basing his film on the novel from crime writer Max Allan Collins, Sam Mendes manages to transmit feelings through silence and attain to get the message he wants to convey across to spectators. The strength of both Sullivan and his son is in personal relationships of trust, love and complicity between them, while characters like Rooney symbolize the two sides of the same coin, both affectionate and ruthless boss and taking on the role of father and enemy at the same time, trying to defend their interests under all circumstances.

The farmers they find in their way and their help and support is vital for the main actor and his son. In fact, if they wouldn’t have helped him, Sullivan would had died, so this happening shows the great importance of money in that Sullivan would have never imagined people acting in good faith as they do.

The portrait of a cold, damp and dark world during the Great Depression fits with the character of Jude Law, an assassin on the mafia’s payroll. This charismatic is taken by Mendes to reinforce the last link on Sullivan’s chain to take revenge on those persons who have taken him to perdition.

What seems to be a simply gangster film turns out to be a cinematographic masterpiece in which spectators are shocked by how they get on with an small-minded person who, after all, brings forth love.

“I saw then that my father's only fear was that his son would follow the same road. And that was the last time I ever held a gun. People always thought I grew up on a farm. And I guess, in a way, I did. But I lived a lifetime before that, in those six weeks on the road in the winter of 1931. When people ask me if Michael Sullivan was a good man, or if there was just no good in him at all, I always give the same answer. I just tell them... he was my father.” Mike Sullivan Jr.