Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by tunenut (A) on December 04, 2013 at 11:30:33

In stark black-and-white, I found this movie absorbing in a way few others have been this year. There is an overwhelming sense of the places, Montana down to South Dakota, and of course small-town Nebraska. All of it both desolate and beautiful.

This is a character study of a bizarre family, the type of family that probably only exists in the movies. The father, played by Bruce Dern, is taciturn and frail, possibly failing mentally, but that is not entirely certain. He gets one of those magazine sweepstakes notices in the mail, and decides he needs to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to claim his prize. His youngest son, with nothing much else going on, agrees to take him. And they stop in the father's home town (fictional Hawthorne, Nebraska), where most of the movie takes place.

Even though these families and characters are peculiar and eccentric, there is a deep emotional resonance here. There are moments of almost slapstick humor, but there is also deep melancholy, sort of like Wild Strawberries, a man having lived his life, looking back on both the good and bad. The son learns some details about his father's life.

There is no action to speak of, and these are not really sympathetic characters, yet it stays with me.