I must say I embarked on a viewing of this film with some trepidation. I’ve always thought of Alexander Payne’s films as “watchable” — and if that sounds like damning them with faint praise, well, that’s the idea. They are films with interesting premises set in interesting places and employing interesting actors but don’t add up to much more than a couple of hours of diversion.

Noting that Nebraska was shot in black and white, I feared that Payne had at last decided to make a full-on art film, which I expected to be pretentious and dreary — but Nebraska is neither of those things.  It’s a modest, well-observed, beautifully shot movie that doesn’t condescend to its quirky heartland characters and their relentlessly flat world.  Instead it takes them seriously, or as seriously as they deserve to be taken, and it loves them, without judgment.

Bruce Dern’s performance sums up what’s good about the movie.  Dern is so deep inside the buttoned-up character he plays that he reveals no more about himself to us than he does to the people around him.  What might have been a showy caricature of old age becomes instead a moving portrait of estrangement and bewilderment.  Dern creates this portrait basically by doing nothing, by reacting blankly to the revelations about his life that the film delivers.

We can read what we want to or need to into his taciturn persona but Payne never prods us into anything.  We’re allowed to be amused by the simple-mindedness of some of the characters we encounter, but Payne never patronizes them.

This is the sort of odd, personal, adventuresome yet circumscribed movie that used to get made with some regularity in the 70s.  It isn’t a great movie by any means, but it’s an admirable and humane movie — a great rarity on the current scene.

Matt Barry’s latest — modern youth on the march . . . not.

It’s very difficult to convey just how bad this movie is. It’s got an intriguing premise and a clever plot, but these things exist for one purpose and one purpose only — to give a lot of cool actors a chance to play outlandish, somewhat sleazy “characters”, to overact and mug, just so you know that the actors aren’t really who they’re pretending to be, that they’re being “brave” to essay such roles.

Every other scene is an emotional climax, with shouting, crying, a breakdown or a fit — all those things actors love to do to show off their chops.  Here they get to show off their chops almost every minute they’re on screen.  It’s exhausting and infuriating, this non-stop display of self-indulgence.

In the middle of it all, though, is a modest miracle — Amy Adams, who actually seems to be inhabiting her role, playing her character from the inside.  She can’t redeem the awful dialogue she’s given, but she reminds you what real acting is all about and serves as a kind of rebuke to the posturing going on around her.

The New York Film Critics Circle named this the best picture of the year.  What were they thinking?

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