Payne's About Schmidt and The Descendants: The Same Story?
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Alexander Payne
ecarle — 12 years ago(August 29, 2013 07:57 AM)
I very much like the work of Alexander Payne, and one of the riddles he's given me is: how and why does he choose the stories he chooses(usually from rather obscure novels) to tell?
Its hard to find a unifying principle in them. He's made enough films now that we can see the cinematic uniformity: Payne's reliance on deadpan lingering shots of photographs to tell the story(Reese Witherspoon's yearbook photos in Election; A photo of a prizewinning cow in About Schmidt, photos of Miles' late father(Paul Giamatti's REAL late father) in Sideways; photos of the ancestors of "The Descendants." Even high school and family photos of the basketball coach turned male hooker(for females) in Payne's pilot of "Hung" for HBO.
The stories themselves have certain general intersects: they are often very moving and likeable stories about people we really SHOULDN'T like Jack and Miles in Sideways, Tracy Flick and Mr. M in Election, etc.
Anyway, with just his five or six films to guide us, Payne has given us two movies that turn out, to me, to be a bit of a "matched pair" in certain ways:
About Schmidt and The Descendants. Consider the connections:- A man who has taken for granted the place of his wife in his life and the stability of his marriage loses that wife to death, suddenly and out of nowhere. (The older Schmidt's near-elderly wife dies at home of natural causes; the younger Matthew King's young wife dies on the ocean in a thrillseeker speedboat accident though yesshe's in a coma when we meet her, but yes, we soon learn she is going to die.)
- This eruptive death comes at almost exactly the same time as a SEPARATE life crisis: Schmidt's retirement after years of workoholic insurance bean-counting with no hobbies to sustain him; King's high-pressure decision about what to do with the family land.
- Each story has narration by the protagonist(with the great voices of Jack Nicholson and George Clooney providing them.)
- With the wife and mother now dead or comatose and dying, the father must deal with a daughter(Schmidt, and his is grown and engaged) or daughters(King, and his are 17 and 10) and confront them with painful truths of father-daughter relationships(Schmidt has a far less receptive daughter than King's though.)
- Only now, AFTER the wife's death(or death sentence, for King's comatose wife), does the husband learn that the wife was having an affair. Schmidt's wife's affair was with her husband's best friend, and perhaps long ago and dead in the later years of old age; King's wife was having the affair when she died and it was new and sexual and she wanted a divorce(but he didn't know that.) In both cases, the husband cannot confront the dead/dying wife but he CAN (and does) confront the male lover.
The stories go their own separate ways, of coursewith Old Man Schmidt in an RV drive to Denver to try to stop his daughter's wedding to "a nincompoop"(his words) and Middle Aged King out to find his wife's lover while trying to decide on that land deal(and behold, th1354e lover and the land deal are agonizingly connected).
But About Schmidt and The Descendants have enough points of connection to suggest that Payne was pulled to both stories for the same reasons: the "shock to the system" a workoholic male gets when his wife dies, his parental duties become solo, he learns his wife loved another man, and the world refuses to get him any slack while he deals with these personal issues.
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cultfilmfreaksdotcom — 11 years ago(June 05, 2014 12:14 PM)
True, both have a guy realizing his wife's cheating after she dies or as she's dying and then dealing with it. Or finding out something after the fact and then having that drive the character crazy. Also his movies are all mostly road trips. But he's my current favorite director of the last decade. It seems like he makes movies for himself, like directors did in the 70's.
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