Director's Spotlight:
Alexander Payne
April 6, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Alexander Payne was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, and it's easy to imagine that his life has been populated by the type of characters and conflicts that we find in his films. After writing and directing the super-indie and critically praised Citizen Ruth in 1996, Payne started attracting attention as a UCLA film-school grad to keep tabs on. His next three features have all been nuanced character studies, and with each new entry, Payne seems to be garnering more critical and commercial buzz – though not necessarily acclaim from yours truly.
Election
As someone who is not too many years removed from a four-year stint in a public high school not terribly dissimilar from Omaha's Carver High, Election features some hard-to-swallow satire. Partially commentating on the American electoral system and partially skewering the prototypical high school hierarchy, this is not the easy, breezy satire of Mean Girls (which I watched and enjoyed while I was in high school). Election follows a few key players – first, there is Reese Witherspoon's Tracy Flick as the girl who knows every answer, and wants you to know that she does, too; she's smart, sure, but more than that, she's cunning – it's easy to imagine her bullying a teacher with her firm and demanding smile in order to get an extra vote or a higher mark in a class. We all grew up with at least one Tracy Flick. Then there's Matthew Broderick's social studies teacher, Mr. McAllister. He is well liked by his students, modest in ambition, attends the Carver High sporting events, and probably did the same thing two decades earlier; it's safe to say everyone had a Mr. McAllister at one point, too. Payne, while only rarely bridging into caricature status, manages to make these characters quite dynamic. Each player (there is also the school jock, the angry lesbian, and the bumbling faculty) is given an inner dialogue and serves as narrator through different portions of the film. The result is an intimate look at the flawed people and flawed system that make up high school politics. The observations are accurate and funny without being broad – there is no lowest-common-denominator humor here. Sure, we all knew a Tracy Flick, but did we always know what she was thinking? Why didn't Mr. McAllister ever aim higher? These questions and others get their answers in Payne's difficult-to-watch deconstruction of an average, middle-American high school.
Witherspoon and Broderick deserve some real kudos as well. Witherspoon had a big year in 1999, somehow managing to play two incredibly prissy, entitled high school girls in Election and the teen-sensation, Cruel Intentions. Both helped send her into a new stratosphere of stardom, with Legally Blonde not far off on the horizon. Watching Broderick, on the other hand, is surreal if you are a fan of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a high school classic in its own right – Ferris is the character by which Broderick will almost certainly always be remembered (unless you're a big fan of Inspector Gadget, of course). In a unique case of having an actor's previous role influence the way you experience their current role, it is sobering, even depressing to see Broderick's Mr. McAllister mosey along through the halls of Carver High with his short-sleeve dress shirt, ugly-brown tie, and sad-conformist nature. Where Bueller thrived outside the system, McAllister flounders within its constraints. Somehow, this contrast elevates the film's message, and I wonder if Payne knew how much that casting decision would affect his film.
Financially, Election probably ended up as a minor winner, but it really depends on what numbers you use. Reports have the production budget anywhere from $8.5 million to $25 million, and with just under a $15 million gross (with negligible earnings from overseas), which report you choose to believe makes a big difference here. Well reviewed and earning one Oscar nomination for best-adapted screenplay, Paramount was probably hoping that their platform release might've earned a tad more. As noted above, though, this comedy isn't so easy to watch, and even though it is funny, it's not exactly fun. Since its release, it has become regarded as something shy of a modern classic – at least in academic circles. Let's call it a wash financially, and a win critically for Payne, and move on to his next feature, set in, you guessed it, Omaha, Nebraska.
About Schmidt
I am a firm believer that a film can be depressing and good at the same time. Scale doesn't have to be big – I am not someone who goes around preaching that the Academy is out of touch with consumers and even while I would have voted differently, I have no problem with someone choosing to honor The Hurt Locker over Avatar. That said, I do have a problem with About Schmidt and the loads of critical praise heaped upon it. Honestly, reading all those reviews on Rotten Tomatoes makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills! Maybe I would "get" it better if I were a depressed, over-the-hill, 65-year-old retiree living in Omaha. But even if I "got" it then, I probably wouldn't enjoy seeing my sad life recreated by Jack Nicholson on the big screen.
About Schmidt tells the not-so-uplifting tale of Warren Schmidt. Warren's life hasn't amounted to much; he is recently retired from a career in insurance, he dislikes his wife (until she dies, suddenly, that is), his daughter thinks little of him and he thinks little of her dead-beat fiancé, and his only outlet for emotional venting comes in the form of long-winded, inappropriately intimate letters he sends to a six-year-old Tanzanian orphan, whom he decided to sponsor as a way of reaching some sort of post-retirement fulfillment.
The truth is, I do in fact "get" what Payne is saying. Warren Schmidt is a man at a crossroads. His problems, like an unfortunate mass of Americans, are largely and maybe even solely existential in nature. His work life was wasted on a job that anyone could have done. His love life was wasted on a woman with whom he had no intimacy. And now he has no way to waste away his free time. He hasn't much culture, much purpose, or much hope. To cope, Schmidt then projects these sour, sad, and uniquely middle-class problems on a young child who has little concept of what it means to be educated or well fed, probably surviving off of Schmidt's measly donations. If this sounds like an evening at the movies that you would enjoy, then please, by all means, move About Schmidt up to the top of your Netflix queue.
About Schmidt also marks Payne's second straight film to take an actor who has long been known for being an arbiter of the cool and the chic – even into his later years – and turn him into a total and complete shlub. Never before and not since has Jack Nicholson seemed so utterly hopeless (not even in the Bucket List, which one might assume would be more of a downer than this film).
For their work, Jack Nicholson and a kooky (and, in one scene, nude) Kathy Bates received Oscar nominations in Best Actor and Supporting Actress categories respectively. The movie rode its critical buzz (and the buzz about Bates baring all) to a very impressive $65 million domestically, without ever earning more than $9 million in a single weekend. With a modest production budget of $30 million, this is the template that all prestige platform releases try to follow. Even with its distinctly American flavor, About Schmidt was able to pull in another $40 million from overseas, making Payne's second major feature, a major success.
Sideways
Moving from Omaha to Santa Barbara wine country, Payne changes the setting but not the themes in his 2004 entry, Sideways. Here, Paul Giamatti stars as the self-tortured protagonist – he is not a character so much as a person that probably lives down the block somewhere; his problems are both painfully real and at times, depressingly humorous. He is on the lonely end of a failed marriage, a failed book deal, and his biggest sense of companionship comes from his expansive knowledge of wine, which he tries to share with his philandering, over-the-hill best friend (played by Thomas Haden Church in a career-reviving role).
Sideways manages to be both sad and realistic and painfully amusing at the same time. As a 22-year-old viewer, it's simultaneously scary and funny to watch these 40-something men do their middle-aged version of what I am doing now. On this road trip, the two of them are trying to get their careers moving, they are trying to get the girls, they are trying to party hard – in short, it sounds more like my senior year of college than Paul Giamatti's mid-life crisis. With this most recent film, Payne corrects for that which I hated about About Schmidt. This is not a melodrama – it is depressing without being boring, it is heartfelt without being heavy handed. Throwing in a dose of farcical humor for good measure (watch for the scene where Thomas Haden Church is forced to run back to his motel sans clothing), Sideways is a much more accomplished entry into Payne's staple category of average American dramedies.
For the fourth straight time, critics found almost no fault in Payne's efforts. Sideway's entered rarified air when it earned a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. As an October release, the film was the early frontrunner in the Oscar race before giving way to Million Dollar Baby's late season momentum. Even still, Sideways earned itself five nominations in categories that matter (Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, and adapted screenplay) and it won for screenplay.
Just like with About Schmidt, Sideways followed the prestige platform release pattern to a T. Astoundingly, Sideways never earned more than $6.3 million in a single weekend, and yet its total topped $71 million domestically. Tagging on another modest, $38 million from overseas, Sideways was a huge win for Payne and Fox Searchlight. And though it almost goes without saying, being another small-scale character study, Sideways had a quaint budget of $16 million. Without a critical miss on his resume and with two straight Oscar-bait successes, Payne's next entry will arrive with higher expectations than any of his previous films.
The Descendants
After a long hiatus from feature filmmaking (he did direct a vignette for Paris, Je t'aime as well as the pilot for Hung on Showtime), Payne has finally started shooting his follow-up to Sideways. The Descendants is, like Sideways, coming from Fox Searchlight and is also budgeted at $15 million; it's fairly clear that Payne is going to be sticking with his trend of small-scale, honest storytelling. Presumably, The Descendants will see George Clooney embrace the persona he built by playing Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air, as Payne will likely have him taking some sort of existential journey.
The one-line, officially released synopsis of the film is a bit vague, but Payne's films are not easily summarized in a single sentence anyway. The book on which it is based focuses on a wealthy Hawaiian attorney who learns that his not-so-faithful wife, after suffering from a boat-racing accident, has been sent into a coma. Clooney must then must work to repair his relationship with his children, while also setting out to confront the man with whom his wife was having an affair. The book is described as a tragicomedy of sorts, and, as such, suits Payne's filmmaking sensibilities.
Also of note, The Descendants will be Payne's first feature that he co-wrote with someone other than his writing partner Jim Taylor (though Taylor is listed as a producer).
Payne also has several projects in development, most notably a project called Downsizing, which was initially planned as his follow-up to Sideways. With Giamatti in the lead role again, Downsizing (also based on a novel) has a description more befitting a Spike Jonze production – it follows a man who shrinks himself to the size of a "little person" in order to have an easier existence. If Downsizing does get off the ground at some point (apparently cost was an issue), it will be interesting to see Payne stretch outside of his comfort zone a little bit with material that is less grounded in reality. In the meantime, it wont be so bad to see Payne and Clooney team up for another entry in the tried and true. Like other Payne entries, expect a film without a real antagonist – as in Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways, the protagonist is always his own worst enemy. Expect painfully relatable characters and story lines, and expect some touching comedy. But don't expect anything especially new.