Charles Stone III, who made this year's most promising directorial debut in Paid In Full, now extends his sensitive, adroit view of black American life in the college drama Drumline. Unfortunately, neither film got the fanfare it deserved. Smart moviegoers should seek them both out. Stone resurrects Uplift as a theme: in Drumline Harlem ace Devon (Nick Cannon) gets a scholarship to a college in Atlanta based on his musical drumming skill. To join the school's show-style marching band, Devon has to overcome the narcissism bred in him by an atmosphere of ethnic and cultural patronization. He shouts, "Doing [my thing] is what got me down here." And his band director (Orlando Jones) strongly corrects him. Like a hockey goalie with a wide net, a swift stick and a keen eye, Stone blocks every hiphop-era cliche. Pop cinema like this is to be marveled at.
Thank God Drumline ignores tap-dancing, basketball and rapping to portray black youth ambition as something more than instinct or convention. Stress is on work and literacy as the bulwark of talent. The band competitions are an eyeful (sharply edited by Bill Pankow), but best of all, Devon competes with his bandmates and with his own self-image. This distinguishes Stone's style; he directs Cannon (who suggests a skinny, young Master P) and the other actors with a delicacy and intensity reminiscent of Coppola's Godfather movies. He has a rare sense of the quiet drama in black folks' lives. Devon's confrontation with his estranged father is Drumline's early highpoint, but later, the way Stone photographs Jones as human and not a clown is also a revelation. Even the unhappy faces are deeply, memorably handsome. This promises a directing career aimed at movie-lovers' hearts and minds.
About Schmidt
Directed by Alexander Payne Jack Nicholson isn't going for sarcasm in About Schmidt, which may confound hip audiences looking to disbelieve this good film's portrait of an ordinary white American retiree. Nicholson's seriousness is a sign of respect. Even though the character Warren Schmidt isn't at all a likable person, Nicholson and writer-director Alexander Payne know that his humanity is worth recognizing. Schmidt is one of those gray-haired guys you know from grip-and-grin photographs for rotary clubs and union newsletters, caught in a frieze of ordinariness?a trap more than a few American men fall into because of familial necessity, naive, patriotic belief or a simple lack of imagination. A former insurance company actuary in Omaha, Schmidt feels detached from his wife of 42 years (June Squibb) and goes on the road attempting to control his daughter's impending marriage to a waterbed salesman in Denver?although Schmidt's closeness to his daughter Jeannie (played by Hope Davis) is something the young woman herself can't remember.
Remember Nicholson's charismatic performance over three decades ago as the alcoholic, UFO-obsessed lawyer in Easy Rider? It positioned him to embody the anxieties of America's dissatisfied youth?a calling heroically answered in Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, King of Marvin Gardens and The Last Detail, as well as jaded Jake Gittes in Chinatown and rebellious McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He had one of the great, idiosyncratic runs in pop history, but those 70s King-of-the-Road-Movie characterizations outlasted their social moment because Nicholson played them with authenticity?not in the snarky way he's come to be celebrated for, but the same sedulous, creative way he now takes on the pitifully conformist Schmidt. This performance, seemingly removed from the zeitgeist, actually comes from deep inside it. Nicholson and Payne understand the rampant frustration that exists in America, especially in the work lives of men devoted to being productive, who then get cast aside like those boxes of Schmidt's office files.
No Death of a Salesman sentimentality here; Nicholson and Payne realize exactly how the middle class' social trust/belief characterizes an entire culture in which people pride themselves on individuality and then feel grievously alone. About Schmidt shows the underside of Nicholson's 60s-70s hipness; it belongs to the star's alternate, less-known career as a psychologically-inquiring artist (seen in The Passenger, The Border and his classic, unheralded performance in Hoffa). It's fascinating to watch Jack become the average man in About Schmidt, because we expect that gleam in his eye to be mischievous?a promise of revolution?even though Schmidt is at an age too late for change, lamenting there's "no more adventure in life." Here, Nicholson never winks. It's the gleam of an extraordinary actor playing ordinary to provide extraordinary insight. (Schmidt's voice in conversation is higher, tighter than the mellifluous voice in his head.) Making credible the wit, capability and unease within us all, Nicholson could well be revolutionary again and get the culture back on its wheels. That's more than can be said of Eminem, whose illusory rebellion in the contrasting 8 Mile appeals to sedentary, comfy, middle-aged journalists who, unlike Schmidt, have never examined their own personal politics. (When I compared 8 Mile's theme song "Lose Yourself" to Destiny's Child's "Survivor," gremlins left out my reading of Eminem as Manifest Destiny's child.)
About Schmidt also concerns Manifest Destiny. The opening shots of Omaha could be Anywhere, U.S.A.?not simply the Midwest but our America, a mix of businesses and homes, edifices and domiciles as Sinclair Lewis knew it and as Schmidt discovers on his road trip. These location shots survey working life better than any recent film. Payne's view (he's an Omaha native) is as particular as Whit Stillman's view of the urban haute bourgeoisie. He captures precise office talk ("I'm pretty good, pretty good." "Not too shabby, not too shabby.") and the way muffled anger erupts into sarcasm (at Schmidt's retirement dinner, a drunken toaster snarls "young people" as a pejorative). With co-screenwriter Jim Taylor, Payne exposes work-world habits, revealing that we seldom actually communicate but keep our resentments and dissatisfactions submerged. Schmidt's Denver visit is a farce of people talking at each other from various personal slants (especially Kathy Bates as the bossy, nonconformist mother-in-law). A trailer-park resident sizes up Schmidt, triggering his typical, protective male ego. But Payne pierces Schmidt's armor when alone, atop his Winnebago, praying (recalling Payne's Election). This would include the voiceover narration from letters Schmidt writes to Ndugu, the six-year-old Tanzanian boy he sponsors through Childreach/plan foster care. Alienated from his family and new in-laws, Schmidt confesses to Ndugu the frustrations (the burden of failure) no one around him wants to hear. Will that intolerance include the majority of filmgoers? I've heard disgruntled reactions from people accusing Payne of insensitivity or Schmidt of unworthiness. The fact that Schmidt is peevish and remote upsets viewers not used to complex movie characters. There've been a lot of shallow movies since Five Easy Pieces, and recently two unmitigated efforts at resurrecting the 70s road movie, Bruce Paltrow's Duets and Brad Freundlich's World Traveler (both flawed but impressive) were met with incomprehension, as if people no longer searched for meaning?in life or movies. On the road, a bug plasters itself against Schmidt's windshield, signaling that many moviegoers watch movies that way, looking past the human debacle on view. Nicholson makes an unlikable man human?a rare feat.
Payne is working out a movie style that's half-satire, half-realism. Imagine Mike Leigh's astute social vision, adding a taste for the absurd. About Schmidt may be his most challenging film yet, because Schmidt seems so banally all-American, a figure we're used to blaming for society's faults. And yet Payne and Nicholson are open-minded about his type. They come up with one of the most beautiful (and by no means simple) endings any movie has ever had. A friend likens it to the climax of Kurosawa's Ikiru. Okay, but these days a rigorously compassionate American movie deserves to be considered original.