Payne: Nebraska (2014)

No contemporary filmmaker is quite so gifted as Alexander Payne at capturing speech in transit, the way conversation is contoured by the rhythms of the road. On the face of it, Nebraska is no exception – it’s about the relationship between a father and son, Woody Grant and Dave Grant, played by Bruce Dern and Will Forte, who take a road trip from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect a million dollars that Woody thinks he’s won on a lottery sweepstakes. On the way, they stop over at Hawthorne, South Dakota, Woody’s home town, where they’re joined by his irascible wife, Kate (June Squibb) and reunited with a cast of characters they haven’t seen in some fifty years. Most of the film takes place in Hawthorne, as Payne condenses his peripatetic scope to a couple of blocks – the intersection of the town’s two main streets – as if all the momentum of these once busy highways and byways had drained out into the small towns along their shores. What perhaps sets it apart from Payne’s earlier work, then, is that Woody’s quite a reluctant, aggressive conversationalist – in one of the most poignant performances of his career, Dern conjures up a man who’s on the very cusp of senility, continually breaking off mid-sentence to stare, stupefied, into the past. As a result, conversation tends to be absorbed into the landscape much more than in Payne’s previous films, meaning that it very much plays as a kind of sustained landscape film, a tribute to the road. And, like Bruce Springsteen’s iconic album, which seems to lurk behind the film as a statement of intent, it’s a road that tells a story of decline and decay, as Payne evokes the fallout from the Rust Belt across the Corn Belt, the dissolution of hope across the Great Plains. Except where Springsteen’s Rust Belt was momentarily entranced, crystallised, even mobilised by the spectacle of its own evisceration, that’s not quite the case here – some thirty years later, everyone’s had more of a chance to get used to it, learned to live with it, making for a gentler, more dispersed sadness, spread across a road too wrapped in slumber to even decide whether it’s still ripe for mythology, as town after sleepy town unfolds, motel after forgotten motel; a plethora of barely-travelled bus routes, residues of whatever ancient reason there might have been to travel from Montana to Nebraska, through some of the least visible states in contemporary Hollywood. And as the gorgeous black-and-white palette suffuses everything with the mellifluous monotony that the road acquires after several days of straight driving, it transforms almost subliminally into a companion piece to The Descendents – an elegy for the American family, or the fantasy of the American family, less old-timey than no-timey, as Payne gets back to the lo-fi roots he never really had.