Alexander Payne: Chronicles of the Middle-Aged Man
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Alexander Payne
ecarle — 12 years ago(August 29, 2013 08:34 AM)
I only rarely come to boards about newer movies because while I am young at heart, I am middle of age, and I realize these boards are mainly visited by youth.
But from the middle-aged perspective, I can tell you that Alexander Payne's movies are probably beloved by middle-aged people because they are often about middle-aged people, particularly MEN, and they study their frusttraions and dreams and crushed hopes.
Paul Giamatti and Thomas Hayden Church are middle-aged versions of Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in "Swingers" but 20 more years of age makes all the difference in life experience, melancholy, and desperation. Note how Church is still desperattely pinning his life on getting sex, even as he is finally going to get married. Note how Giamatti is on a quest to get over lost love. It has more sting in middle-age.
Matthew Broderick's high school teacher looks young, but he is aging too and he HA5b4TES seeing the evil and driven Tracy Flick advance in life as he realizes that he is stuck in a rut, out of gas.
The gray-haired George Clooney in "The Descendants" is flummoxed by his rebellious,foul-mouthed teenage girls, and coming to realize that he is aging, too. (Note that his wife's male lover is at least ten years younger than he is, and that she got fatally injured on a boat with a studly young blond muscleman.)
Payne directed the pilot of the HBO series "Hung"(and executive produced it) and it is in Payne's wheelhouse, too: Thomas Jane's Detroit area basketball coach is divorced, broke and unsure of his job security when we meet him, so he turns his biggest attribute(an unseen but we are told, huge male member) to become a male prostitute for ladies only. A "golden boy" athlete whose injury took him out of pro ball, Jane is yet ANOTHER of Payne's middle-aged protagonists (and Jane, in depending on his sexual prowess for a career in middle age, is risking it all on a private part that will soon lose its power, without pills.)
Jack Nicholson's Schmidt is beyond middle age he's retirement age, being "put out to pasture" as we meet him, his younger replacement unintersted in learning from him, his life's work thrown into boxes and into the trash. And as an insurance lifespan expert, he knows how many years he has left, give or take and there are fewer left5b4 when he loses his wife, he knows.
So even as young people can and do like stories about "their future" Alexander Payne may be so beloved in some circles right now because he speaks not only to an "adult" audience, but to a middle-aged audience.
And they are important, too.