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I once read an interview with Roddy McDowell in which he stated that actors have three stages in their careers, and that they are not always successful in each. In the beginning you win them by simply being charming. You’re young and beautiful, have an impish smile, whatever. Then you mature and the little gimmicks that charmed audiences don’t quite cut it.
In the last stage you are an elder statesman of the silver screen and the roles are of an entirely different class as you re-invent yourself once more. Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood and Michael Caine come to mind here… and Jack Nicholson.
Nicholson is an actor who by any measure has had a charmed career in the film industry. And deservedly so when you remember the range of memorable characters he has invented since catching our attention as George Hanson in Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider. Who can forget J.J. Gittes in Chinatown, or Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?
It’s the uniqueness of the characters he inhabits that is as surprising as anything. Compare the obsessive/compulsive writer Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets to mob boss Frank Costello in The Departed. Both roles show range. And in About Schmidt we see another subtly fine performance, possibly less appreciated because it doesn’t draw attention to itself.
The film was a sleeper, perhaps because of the seriousness of its tone while simultaneously being marketed as a comedy. We missed it in the theaters, if it ever came to out neck of the woods, but saw it referenced in a book by Robert K. Johnston titled Useless Beauty. Johnston’s book analyzes the complex engagement between faith and culture by studying a range of contemporary films including among others Signs, Magnolia, and Run, Lola, Run. The book’s subtitle is Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film.
About Schmidt begins with Nicholson as businessman Warren Schmidt sitting in his office at…
