38th Favorite Movie - About Schmidt

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

About Schmidt is more an Alexander Payne movie than a Jack Nicholson movie.

Let me explain: a Jack Nicholson movie tends to have him smirking a lot, making witty wisecracks, looking sexy, etc. Here, Jack is not smirking, not witty and not sexy... unless you like old guys who spend most afternoons in their pj's eating frozen dinners in front of the TV.

Alexander Payne is the writer/director who also made Election and Sideways. I couldn't really put my finger on what makes his movies stand out, so I went on imdb.com and snagged this post from someone: "Payne has a wonderful capacity for balancing bittersweet wit and black comedy with a genuine, heartfelt compassion for his characters. He can really capture a certain fragile, ephemeral quality to life that most other writer-directors seem incapable of pinning down."

Thank you SugarSnap, whoever you are, you hit the nail right on the head.

This movie is flat-out funny. A few years ago when I was running the college/young adult group at church, we would gather to watch movies and talk about what they meant. Some scenes from this film brought the house down with laughter.

But it also led to some heartfelt discussion. About Schmidt is a very personal movie. As you can tell from the title it is about a guy named Schmidt. But it is also about you, the viewer. As Schmidt looks back on his life after retirement and wonders if it all meant anything, we are forced to ask ourselves the same question: what mark, if any, will I have left on the world after leaving it?

My favorite element of the movie is the relationship that Schmidt builds with a child he sponsors in Africa. Throughout the film he fights his loneliness by pouring his heart out in letters to this six year old boy.

******SPOILER ALERT!!!******

In the last scene of the movie, he receives a letter back from the child. The link below is to the last 3 minutes of the movie. I debated whether to post this link because it is much more powerful after seeing the entire movie before it, but it is still one of my favorite endings of all time in the history of cinema and it never fails to move me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfcjyXmSqOs

******END OF SPOILER ALERT!!!******

Schmidt finds meaning in his life not through work... not through retirement... not through having a big house and new motorhome... but through discovering that he has helped another less fortunate person - "the least of these" as Jesus said. Speaking of, I recently learned that the saying "It is more blessed to give than to receive" is not only from the Bible, but from the mouth of Jesus! It is found not in the Gospels but tucked away in Acts 20:35. Through giving, Schmidt finds a purpose to his life.

We should all be so lucky!