When putting together his critically acclaimed neo-noir thriller After Dark, My Sweet, James Foley instructed his casting director to "go find me a Bruce Dern type" for the crucial role of Uncle Bud, a retired cop whose avuncular manner masks an undercurrent of psychosis. For three months, a succession of hopeful players was brought to Foley's attention but all fell short of the mark, none possessing the necessary blend of twinkling intensity and barely repressed craziness. In the end, exasperated, the casting director made a startling suggestion: "Why don't you just get Bruce Dern?"
Having worked with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Bob Rafelson, Roger Corman and Hal Ashby, Dern had earned himself a reputation in the 1960s and 1970s as a purveyor of wild-eyed rebels, creepy husbands and unhinged villains. Even in his most sympathetic role as the caretaker of Earth's last forests in Douglas Trumbull's sci-fi tearjerker Silent Running, he got to blow up two men and kill another with a shovel. In 1979 he was Oscar-nominated for his supporting performance in Coming Home. Yet despite a strong showing in That Championship Season, Dern's star waned in the 1980s. It took Foley to put him back on the map in 1990 with After Dark, My Sweet in a role tailormade for his electrifying screen presence.
Twenty three years later, The Descendants director Alexander Payne has once again reminded us of Dern's extraordinary power, although this time he has been cast against type in a role most notable for its underlying fragility. Just as he did with Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, Payne gets Dern to rein in the familiar tropes, working with the echoes of previous roles to create a character more afflicted by melancholia than madness. He plays Woody Grant, a crotchety, senile old drunk mired in Billings, Montana, who becomes convinced that he will be the recipient of a $1m sweepstakes prize if he can just get himself to Lincoln, Nebraska.
We first meet Woody trudging bow-leggedly up the highway, wandering through traffic, apparently intent on walking the 750 miles to collect his winnings. Returned home by the police, Woody sets straight out again on his pilgrimage, despite his family's insistence that there is no pot of gold waiting for him at the end of this scam mail-marketing rainbow. Eventually his harassed son David (Will Forte) decides it's safer to just drive the old fool to Lincoln, and so they hit the road, stopping en route in Woody's old home town of Hawthorne, where a careless word about their mission makes him the subject of local gossip, celebrity and (inevitably) greed.
Processed in grainy black and white (the crisp digital image has been degraded to approximate arcane monochrome celluloid) and owing a tonal debt to David Lynch's sentimental road movie The Straight Story, Nebraska tunes its bittersweet "personal journey" riffs to the plaintive waltz of picked guitars and lyrical fiddles, played out against a backdrop of fading midwest towns and long, lonesome interstates.
It's no surprise that the real goal will be emotional rather than financial, but there's more than enough humanist laughter on the way to keep this on the right side of trite. Former sketch comedy writer Bob Nelson's screenplay is full of wry rural observations (Mount Rushmore looks "unfinished, like someone got bored… ") and Payne's familiar Sideways-glance at the foibles of people in quiet crisis is typically sympathetic. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael uses the widescreen frame to make the most of the panoramic scenery, but also conjures some fine tragicomic tableaux in the run-down interiors, particularly when shooting from the point of view of the TV set around which the taciturn menfolk habitually gather. Their gazes are fixed forward, but their conversation is tangential, circling round inevitably to the subject of how long it took them to get there ("Two days? Must have been driving in reverse!") and what car they came in.
The real pleasures, however, are in the performances, with the septuagenarian Dern turning in his best work since Silent Running. As the complex lost soul who can be at once endearing and infuriating, he slips perpetually between irascibility and incoherence, focusing just long enough to exasperate those around him. It's a rich and rewarding role into which Dern duly sinks his teeth (a search for Woody's dentures beside the railway tracks is a comic highlight), the distinctive curl of his upper lip perfectly attuned to the mix of bull-headed defiance and goofy charm.
As Woody's chalk-and-cheese sons, Will Forte and Bob Odenkirk are effectively understated, their shrugs and glances speaking volumes. There's hefty menace, too, in Stacy Keach's good ole boy, whose karaoke Elvis impression offers a prelude to threats in the men's room. But not even he is a match for the mighty June Squibb, marvellous as Woody's foul-mouthed wife, who seems to have spent a lifetime knocking back potential suitors, and who proudly waves her nethers at a graveside to show some old bugger what he missed. As for Dern, a best actor prize at Cannes seems to herald a new chapter in his career, an overdue recognition that he was always more than just a "Bruce Dern type". Bravo!
