Bull Schmidt. (Now Playing).(About Schmidt)(Movie Review)

The new movie About Schmidt isn't really about the title character played by Jack Nicholson (an actuary for an Omaha insurance company who reevaluates his life in the wake of his retirement). This movie is about the Midwest--and Hollywood's smug, condescending view of the supposedly dimwitted dullards who live there.

Nicholson's Warren Schmidt is a withered WASP full of buried emotions and unfounded optimism. He only opens up in the thuddingly naive letters he writes to a Tanzanian boy he's "adopted" for $22 a month through a late-night television ad, but even those gloss over the supreme drabness of his existence. When his wife dies unexpectedly-which is of no consequence to Warren aside from his inability to get satisfactory sandwiches--he decides, as a means of giving his life some significance, to try to derail his daughter's marriage to a lazy waterbed salesman.

The waterbed salesman isn't the only boob in the film. Nearly everyone we meet, from Schmidt's dowdy daughter to the haggard hero himself, strolls through life in a haze of self-deception. Sure, these characters are basically at peace, but don't they see that their world--dominated by flat landscapes and gray skies--is utterly lame?

Nicholson does what he can to make Schmidt vaguely human. His sighs have a tinge of compassion and his shuffle has a smidgen of sympathy. But if Nicholson, like Schmidt, is an optimist, director Alexander Payne and screenwriter Jim Taylor are dedicated pessimists and despisers of the booboisie. Any time Schmidt attains some modicum of happiness, the filmmakers throw another humiliation in his face.

A regular team, Payne and Taylor have always dealt in satire, but they've previously chosen fairer targets. Their debut, Citizen Ruth, was a bold skewering of the fanaticism on both sides of the abortion debate, while Election, their 1999 triumph, used the device of a rigged high-school election to deride the pettiness of big-time politics.

Who knows why this time around they've decided to lampoon a Midwestern everyman? Considering that movie theaters actually do exist in that vast ...