Alexander Payne, the director of The Descendants, Sideways and About Schmidt, has a new film, Nebraska. It's simple and brilliant, beautifully nuanced, funny, well acted and generous. It's in black and white and begins with an old man walking down the side of a highway in cold weather in Billings, Montana. This is Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), and he's planning to walk to Nebraska to collect his million dollars from a sweepstakes notice he's received in the mail. Every American adult has received such a notice. Printed like a deed, it says you've won a million bucks. Only in the fine print does it say you've won only if your numbers match. It's a trick to sell magazine subscriptions.
The movie refuses the idea that Woody's actions come from mental illness, dementia or Alzheimer's. When a woman at the sweepstakes office asks David, Woody's son, played by Will Forte: "Does he have Alzheimer's or something?", David responds: "He just believes stuff that people tell him." She says: "That's too bad."
Payne has gone straight for the American throat. Most US literature and cinema is driven by despair over money. It seems that Americans have somehow all been told something about what they're owed, and that they've believed it.
Think of Raymond Carver's stories; every one of his characters is driven by desperation over money. Earl Ober, for instance, in They're Not Your Husband, is "between jobs" as a salesman. His worth is determined externally, through mimetic desire. When two men at the counter of a diner find his wife, Maureen, a waitress, undesirable, he tries to undo that scene, to make it not have happened. He puts her on a diet then returns to the diner to goad other men into saying what they think of her now. He's caught by another waitress, though, and in the end all eyes are on him, the story reversed, and the waitress asks, "Who is this joker?" and his wife responds, "He's a salesman. He's my husband," then goes to "total up his check". All of which is to say he's nothing. American fiction looks at the emptiness of the American soul when the outward look fails.
This is Payne's subject, this emptiness. Woody had planned to buy a new truck and compressor with that million dollars, restoring things lost or never had, and he wanted to leave something for his sons, a legacy. At the end of his life, he's come face to face with the terror of his utter meaninglessness and can look only to money for meaning, because this is all we have in America: money with an oblique reference to family. My Uncle Jim, from Nebraska, destroyed his life and his family's life in pursuit of instant riches through Amway, the pyramid scheme of product sales that is so aptly named American Way. He'd had a job with the government and a house and pool in a good neighbourhood in a lovely part of California but lost it all, went bankrupt, divorced and lived in a trailer until his heart ruptured from smoking. Or maybe he'd lost everything first through trying to sell real estate and Amway was supposed to be the recovery.
Either way, trying to sell things is how he lost everything. What I remember is going goose hunting with him and his friend Big Al, jammed between them in the pickup for 10 hours while they brayed and farted and the tape recorder blared out the Amway dream, something along the lines of "You can get that diamond ring! You can have that Mercedes!" The most uncomfortable part was selling to family and friends, since that's how the Amway business works, selling to people who don't really want to buy but feel obligated. He wanted to get me and my mother under him in the pyramid scheme, running our own arm of the business for him.
This relationship between family and money is where Payne's movie really sings. Woody's son agrees finally to drive his father to Nebraska to collect the winnings, and they stop in Hawthorne for a kind of family reunion. Once the family finds out about the money, though – and they won't believe David's insistence that there is no money, because of their great despair and need – there are some ugly and very funny scenes. What's demanded are essentially reparations, because money is supposed to make up for all we suffered and all we didn't become. Each of them wants a piece, and family means nothing at all beyond this.
Payne's last movie, The Descendants, was also on this theme. A family of many siblings that has inherited a huge piece of land in Hawaii wants to sell to developers, but one of the heirs, played by George Clooney, holds out and decides not to. There's an ugly moment when it becomes clear that family means absolutely nothing versus money, and his family becomes his enemy.
How is it we became like this? My falling out with my mother was over money. She wanted me to take loans for one part of my sailing business and use them to repay her for another part of the business, even though that would have been illegal and I wasn't in default on her loan. No amount of screaming on the phone between Greece and California could lead to understanding. Later, she refused me a very small loan I needed desperately, and I never quite forgave her. My heart is as hardened from money as any character's in this movie, and my family as damaged. My stepmother's family fell out over money from a will. I had a sour relationship with my uncle for many years because I sold him one of my father's rifles instead of giving it to him, and my mother had fought with him over how he handled my father's estate as executor. It took them probably 30 years to partially patch that up, enough to be able to smile at my sister's wedding and not fight. I'm sure people fight over money in other cultures, too, but in America it feels like total decimation, because what else binds us together?
All the characters in Flannery O'Connor's stories and William Faulkner's stories are just as driven by money and its shadow form, class, but are also driven by racist rage, something even worse. Payne doesn't address race in his film, so he has only one hand on the American throat. In O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge, Julian imagines himself educated and free of prejudice but really wants a return to the family mansion and its slaves and the old south. "He never spoke of it [the old mansion] without contempt or thought of it without longing." His mother keeps reminding him that he's a Godhigh (the ironic family name). They're in "reduced circumstances", but can still remember "who they are". Julian is filled with rage because he knows they are, in fact, nothing now without the money.
Only money can truly amaze or change things. After Woody has been cheered in the bar of his hometown for his winnings, he asks his son: "Did you see the look on those fellers' faces?" And he has to repeat it, he's so struck. This is what he wanted, to be made something. He's offered publicity in the local paper and told that they're all proud of him. In a culture that is a wasteland, in which more than half of Americans don't read a single book in a year, money can become both accomplishment and self, and one almost literally doesn't exist without it.
The men in Nebraska have no idea why they're alive or what they were supposed to do or be. The women have a better sense, but this film is focused on the emptiness of men. At the family reunion, they all sit watching a football game on a Sunday, all blank-faced. The only talk is of an old car one of them used to own, from 1979. One brother presents a thesis: "They don't make 'em like that any more. Those cars will run for ever. Say, whatever happened to it?" His brother responds, "It stopped running." The first brother says, "Yeah, they'll do that."
David asks his father about marrying his mother: "You must have been in love, at least at first." "It never came up." David has been hesitating about getting married, his girlfriend has moved out now, tired of waiting, tired of nothing, and his father has little wisdom to offer after a life lived unconsciously.
I won't say what happens in the end, except that the son lets his father have some dignity, to not be small and nothing, and that this can only be accomplished through buying things and then letting others see what's owned. The movie is only marginally a father-and-son story, but it had me wondering whether all such stories are about letting the father become something. It also had me wondering whether dignity is possible in American culture. The American sense of dignity comes from family values, but American families dissolve instantly when you add money; so if the only dignity left is money, is that enough?
Nebraska opens nationwide on Friday 6 December
David Vann is the author of a collection of stories, Legend of a Suicide, and the novels Caribou Island and Dirt. His third novel, Goat Mountain, came out in October.
