The Talkies

...What happened to the rest of him...

...The movies are watched by everybody...

...Sometimes the role of innocence may be very small and ironic, as it is in Cabaret, for instance, where almost the only innocence belongs to those who will go on to become history's greatest murderers...

...Sophisticates know that the criminal justice system is, as Billy sings in one of the show's many lively but tuneless songs, "a big circus"—just as they know that love and marriage are a sham, that men are lying, cheating scoundrels and women sly vixens with a propensity to lethal violence...

...No one is interested in anything he has to say...

...Of course you're a sophisticate...

...At last his quest has an object...

...Second, why does Jeannie want to marry Randall...

...A clue that the filmmakers understand this difficulty comes during the credits, when we are solemnly notified as follows: "Richard Gere's singing and dancing performed by Richard Gere...

...Most embarrassing of all, Randall is effusive in his admiration of him...

...Jeannie takes his intervention in ill part, hitting the ceiling when he pleads with her: "You're making a big mistake...

...Warren's speech at the wedding reception is truly a great cinematic moment—a celebration of (gasp) emotional continence, of politeness, of a refusal to make a fuss and is effective partly because our expectations, both of Jack Nicholson and of the long-running movie romance with personal authenticity, go entirely the other way...

...But he is also telling us that it is an accomplishment just to be able to take what life has to dish out to us...

...After his wife's death, Schmidt proposes to go to Denver to stay with his daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) for a while before her wedding to a dimwitted waterbed salesman called Randall Hertzel (Dermot Mulroney...

...Is...

...As a means of defusing the dangerous self-indulgence of voiceover narration, this is hard to beat...

...With Payne's snaffle between his teeth and blinders firmly fastened down, Nicholson turns in what may be the finest performance of his career as Warren Schmidt, a retired insurance man from Omaha—Payne's home town, whither the action has been transplanted from Long Island...

...don't marry this guy"—and appealing to her: "Just look at these people...

...They're too democratic to invite their audience to feel superior to others...

...I think Alexander Payne (Election, Citizen Ruth) understands this in About Schmidt, the movie he directs from a screenplay he developed, along with Jim Taylor, from a novel by Louis Begley, but he does not always succeed in skirting the fatal tendency to portray his Hector as pathetic, rather than heroic, as Willie Loman rather than Marshall Will Kane...

...It is in many ways a charming idea for a movie, but it leaves us unsatisfied...

...It is just because there is no obvious moment of divine revelation or self-knowledge, no catastrophic loss or wise teacher or life-changing precept to effect the transformation, that we are persuaded when he writes, after a bit of soul-searching while observing the stars from the top of his recreational vehicle one night: "And so, Ndugu, after my night in the wilderness, I awoke like a man transformed?' Now, he says, he knows what he has to do: to stop his daughter's wedding to the "nincompoop" Randall...

...But that sociological raison d'être doesn't translate along with the rest of the material to the movies...

...But even this is enough to put into some kind of perspective the bawdy comedy of the rest, which would otherwise grow insipid...

...First, we don't see why relations between Warren and Jeannie are so strained...

...Fortunately, this is kind of set-up stuff, and a more authentic and interesting voice emerges as he pours out his life story in letters to a six-year-old child, Ndugu, in Africa whom he has "sponsored," for a trifling sum each month, in response to a television advertisement...

...The rubes and the suckers are everybody who doesn't watch Broadway plays...

...His Loman-ish quality at times almost suggests self-pity, as when he tells us in voiceover of how oppressive he finds the presence of his wife Helen (June Squibb)—"Who is this old woman living in my house...

...On Broadway, the invitation to feel superior works better, since part of the Broadway experience is the sense of belonging to an elite...

...There are a few problems with the film...

...Is it all, as he suspects before Ndugu's picture arrives, just a waste...

...But Warren has by now reached the age at which there is not a lot left to discover...

...It sort of looks as if that is what Payne is telling us...

...Needless to say, the idea of such a requirement in this -case is a result of Chicago's not meeting it—not even attempting to meet it...

...What sad history of hers makes it worth settling for him...

...This guy knows better, but he also knows that his knowledge is not wanted or needed, and accepting that with a good grace is one of the hardest things we ever have to do, and the hardest thing of all for a movie...

...True, he has one song, "Mr...

...After sixty-six years, all he has to show for his life is the thanks of a sixyear-old he has never met for a contribution that is a ridiculously small part of himself...

...He travels to his birthplace, now a tire store, and his old fraternity at the University of Kansas, his alma mater...

...Catherine Zeta-Jones's singing and dancing performed by Catherine Zeta-Jones...

...It introduces a note of whimsy and self-deprecation, since Ndugu must be utterly mystified by 90 percent of what his benefactor has to tell him, but it also serves as a constant reminder of the latter's bumbling good intentions...

...Finally, we have to wonder why this man appears to have no friends and pours his heart out to a six-year-old child in Tanzania...

...The part that is meant to be inspiring, where Ndugu draws him a picture in thanks for his $22-a-month contribution and a tear rolls down his cheek as he thinks that here,at least, is something he has accomplished, some place in the world where he has made a difference, is actually rather depressing...

...Like Nicholson himself under Payne's firm directorial hand, his character has to suck it up...

...The movie does to us what Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) does to his clients when he assures them that they, like him, are in the know and that together they can put one over on the rubes and the suckers...

...He tells us of hishaving wanted to be somebody, "not like Henry Ford or Walt Disney but someone semi-important," but settling for the security of the insurance company job...

...But Payne crosses us up, he doesn't allow us the easy satisfaction of a hero whose noisy insistence on his own way of looking at things or doing things produces an inevitable but implausible triumph for him...

...There is something about the primordial impulse to sing that should be respected and that cannot quite do without it...

...What is most impressive about the film, I think, is that this is not seen as a tragedy...

...Warren states what is the obvious when he tells her that she is way out of his league, but she doesn't seem to want to know...

...And nothing," he says, "is going to stop me...

...For nowadays we are all sophisticates, just as the school-children in Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone are all above average...

...The voyage of self-discovery with all that it suggests of emotional (and other forms of) liberation finally leaves him untouched...

...T here are many different ways for traditionalists in the arts to identify themselves, but one that occurs to me after watching Rob Marshall's cinematic version of Chicago is to suggest that the traditionalist requires that musicals and opera include a role for innocence...

...Everything she does irritates me"—until she dies and he suddenly realizes how much she meant to him...

...Cellophane," whose self-pity may inspire in the audience an answering pity, but there can be no admiration or affection for someone so willing to make a victim of himself...

...Indeed, it is perhaps the only achievement fully worthy of the artist's attention...

...Renee Zellweger's singing and dancing performed by Renee Zellweger...

...that's why you're watching a Broadway play...

...How has this isolation happened...

...Just think of Hector or Oedipus or Beowulf or Roland or King Lear...

...He still has to suck it up as he has been sucking it up all his life...

...Nicholson's ability to convey that sense of personal authenticity is what made him a star...

...He meets a younger couple who seem friendly and sympathetic, but he ends up making an embarrassing pass at the wife and has to make a quick getaway...

...At least the makers of the movie, as of the musical on which it is based, know these things, since the only person they have to show us who does not know them—besides the anonymous juries—is the pathetic Amos (John C. Reilly), cuckolded husband of Roxie, and he is merely a gull and a laughingstock...

...Only where the rubes and suckers in Billy's case are the members of Chicago juries in the 1920s, called upon to exonerate Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) and Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) for murdering the men who done them wrong, it is not quite clear who are the rubes and suckers to whom we are being invited to feel superior...

...But she puts him off, obviously wanting no part of him in close proximity, and he embarks instead on a mock-heroic quest—which becomes a voyage of self-discovery, as heroic and mock-heroic quests alike almost invariably do in the movies —in the behemoth of a Winnebago his late wife had made him buy...

...When he arrives at the home of the appalling Randall's even more appalling mother (Kathy Bates), he has to fight her off...

...It is too ordinary for that...

...At least he keeps Jack Nicholson from yielding to his fatal temptation, which is overacting...

...He is living proof that innocence is a mug's game, and when he sings—as when Roxy and Velma and Billy sing—it is more a matter of self-congratulation than of self-expression or genuine feeling...

...But things do stop him...

...At one point when she reproaches him with not being involved in her life until he wants to persuade her to dump Randall, and also in buying a cheap casket for her mother, reasons are hinted at, but the matter isn't investigated any further...

...At least with Roxy and Velma, the self-congratulation is for their cleverness and sexiness, about which there can be no two opinions...