At the start of Nebraska, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), confused and old, is seen slouching doggedly along a highway on the outskirts of his town. "Hey, bud, where ya headed?" asks a solicitous cop. But where can Woody possibly be headed? It takes just one look at the nondescript urban expanse; at the chimney belching out fumes in the background; at the sign reading "Billings City Limits" (that's Billings, Montana) to know he can't be going anywhere special. This is the back of beyond, right? And Woody's surely on the proverbial Road to Nowhere.
In fact, Woody is determined to get to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he's convinced that a million dollars are his for the claiming. It's usual in American cinema to assume that areas such as the stretch between Billings and Lincoln, some 800 miles away, are indeed nowhere – just part of the "flyover country" crossed unnoticed by coast-to-coast plane commuters. But for director Alexander Payne this land really is – spiritually and geographically – the heart of America. Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, where he still spends much of his time, Payne has set four of his six features in his native state and named his latest after it. A lugubrious road comedy, it is hardly a hymn to the excitement of Payne's place of origin – see Nebraska and you won't be rushing to visit – yet he has created a strangely beautiful visual poem on the state and the Midwest in general.
Nebraska may appear to be a grey journey through a grey landscape of two grey men – Woody and his frustrated middle-aged son Dave (Will Forte). But the bleak flatness of the Midwestern landscape, captured in black-and-white widescreen by cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, has a spare beauty of its own. The film is an exploration of forgotten, long undusted corners of middle America – places that painter Norman Rockwell might have appreciated for their downbeat quality then rejected as being insufficiently mythic. These places are not so much melancholy as just plain glum: highways stretch across plains that seem to be permanently frosted, small towns have main streets so wide that the buildings seem to draw back from one another in bashfulness, scrubby yards surround unkempt clapboard houses. Any joy that once resided here seems to have packed up and fled for the coasts back in the 1910s.
Before starting the shoot, Payne and Papamichael went on a three-day trip in the director's mother's car, tracing the exact route taken by Woody and David. "Just being in that landscape creates this feeling of loneliness and desolation," Papamichael tells me. "My first impression was just how devoid of people it was. Driving into some of these smaller towns, you'd see a sign, 'Population 20,000'. We'd drive down Main Street and I'd say, 'Where is everybody?' We did this trip in summer and nobody's outside." So where were they all? "I asked Alexander that. He said, 'I guess they're inside watching TV.' People just tune out, there's not a lot to do there."
Payne has sometimes been accused by critics of mocking the people of his state, but he has pointed out that Nebraskans are the first people to find his films funny (while Nebraska is written not by the director, but Bob Nelson, it's still quintessentially Paynean). "I happen to be from here," he said of Nebraska in a recent New Yorker interview. "You want to explore the mystery of the place you're from."
What makes Payne's films compelling is the idea central to so many of them: in places that are low on cultural distraction, what becomes fascinating is the inhabitants (even if they struggle to find fascination in their own lives). With its story of an elderly man exploring his past, Nebraska comes across as an accidental sequel to Payne's 2002 movie About Schmidt. In that film, Jack Nicholson played a newly widowed and retired insurance company executive (Omaha is famed as the insurance capital of America) who sets out in a Winnebago to see the world for the first time – at least, the part between Omaha and Denver, Colorado. Stops include his home town of Holdrege, Nebraska, where his childhood house has been torn down and replaced with a Tires Plus franchise.
While it's sad that Schmidt's old home is gone, sadder still is the fact that Woody's is still standing, a dilapidated shell propped up amid desolate windblown fields and filled with memories of a severe childhood. Nebraska is haunted by the past, and not always a happy one. Some of its most blackly comic lines occur at the graveyard in the fictional small town of Hawthorne – another sparse panorama stretched across the screen – where Woody's cantankerous wife Kate (the scene-stealing June Squibb) taunts her dead ex-boyfriends.
There has always been a solid foundation of approachable mundanity in Payne's determinedly anti-glamorous comedies – even Hawaii, as seen in The Descendants (2011), has a deeply everyday appearance, like Bournemouth on a temperate bank holiday weekend. In his career-making second feature, high-school comedy Election (1999), you didn't see much of Nebraska, despite a glimpse of a local paper, the Omaha World-Herald. But brief shots of Omaha locations (a power station, suburban parkland, playing fields) provided a matter-of-fact specificity that said you weren't anywhere special as such, just somewhere concrete – far from the generic easy-on-the-eye locations of most US mainstream comedy. Payne likes his films rooted in the real: for Nebraska, production designer Dennis Washington says that he and the director clocked up 12,000 miles recce-ing the state's bars and bowling alleys.
It is Payne's most visually elegant film, and he and Papamichael find poetry in the most unappetising locations, partly thanks to the use of imposingly severe monochrome. Papamichael shot on the digital Arri Alexa camera, but with actual film grain fed into the digital stock. "Black and white is king," Payne recently said. "It never left the world of fine art photography. Why should it leave film?" Black-and-white imagery is inevitably charged with film-history echoes, although Papamichael says he and Payne looked at very few films before making Nebraska – mainly 1940s and 1950s Japanese films – and rarely as precise references. Exceptions were two black-and-white films by Peter Bogdanovich – the Depression-set comedy Paper Moon, "specifically for the feel", and The Last Picture Show, set in a Texan small town in the early 1950s.
The inhospitable horizons of Nebraska's plains, with towns languishing in economic abandonment, also recall John Ford's Depression landscapes in The Grapes of Wrath, photographed by Gregg Toland. But more than any other film, Papamichael's images strongly recall Robby Müller's in Kings of the Road (1976), about a journey through Germany in which director Wim Wenders, ever fixated on transatlantic dreams, nevertheless seemed really to be searching for images of America. Payne confesses that a prime inspiration for Nebraska's look was the early black-and-white films of Jim Jarmusch (himself a Wenders acolyte).
It's barely possible to look at highways and interstate signs without thinking of the tradition of American still photography that has taken to the great outdoors, either to map its landscapes or stare its inhabitants in the face. Again, Papamichael says that he and Payne didn't look at particular references, but acknowledges the presence of peripatetic US photographers such as Robert Frank ("always an influence for his compositions and his shadows") and William Eggleston, who was once advised, "photograph the ugly stuff" and went on to map a nation of gas stations and shopping malls. Another name is David Michael Kennedy: Payne denies that he was influenced by the sleeve photo on a certain singer-songwriter album that shares its name with his film, but if the through-the-windscreen shot on Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska isn't a direct reference, it's nevertheless likely that Kennedy's catalogue of looming skies has impinged on the film's repertoire of echoes.
From Billings to Lincoln is a 13-hour drive in normal conditions, but in Nebraska the journey takes on (minor-league) mythic proportions – if only because of the slowness of Woody and David's progress. Most importantly, father and son follow their own route and don't go anywhere much we'd usually consider special. They do stop off at one familiar landmark, Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Woody glares sceptically at it, then growls, "Doesn't look finished to me … Lincoln doesn't even have an ear. OK, we've seen it."
Tourist sites are not where the interest lies in Payne's films. It lies in what we often think of as non-places – seemingly dead, discarded spaces that nevertheless spark the deepest memories in a Midwestern Proustian way. "We had crew members not just from Nebraska," says Papamichael, "but also from Minnesota and Wyoming. And they all said, 'This captures it – this is how I remember it as a kid.'"
