NEBRASKA

Alexander Payne could now best be described as a world-class director whose every film is an event to look forward to and to celebrate and to paraphrase John Ford when he said "I make westerns", Payne could just as easily say "I make road-movies", and he makes road-movies unlike anyone else. Like Ford, Payne's films deal with small people in large landscapes coping with the daily grind of the mundane, the comical and the tragic. Death, loss and regret figure prominently in Payne's landscape but he handles these subjects with a remarkable lightness of touch and his films deal with journeys, both literal and metaphorical, that end in an epiphany.

In Payne's latest film, "Nebraska", the journey is of a father and son, (and latterly a mother), back to the place of the father's upbringing. But this is no nostalgic bonding exercise; the father, (a magnificent Bruce Dern, in a career-defining performance), believes he has won a million dollars and must travel to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim his prize. The son knows it's all a scam but indulges his father's whim and drives him there, mostly because there is nothing much else going on in his life. The journey, like the journeys in "About Schmidt", "Sideways" and "The Descendants" is, of course, about more than the literal travelling from one place to another and about moving to another place within ourselves that we had either lost or have yet to find. Dern is a simple man who believes anything he is told and everyone who tells him. Consequently he is taken advantage of by everyone around him and it's only his son, (a lovely, subdued Will Forte), who is prepared to tell him the truth yet even he is prepared to hide those truths that he knows will hurt his father.

In dramatic terms not a great deal happens yet you could say all human life is here. Most of the characters are old and have lived lives of little consequence in the greater scheme of things yet they are mostly happy. They haven't missed what they haven't had. Life hasn't passed them by; it's just something they've observed from the sidelines and a million dollars will buy Dern the new truck he has always wanted and the compressor he gave to an old friend thirty years before. That's all a million dollars means to him.

It is, of course, a comedy; as funny and as sad as "About Schmidt" and "The Descendants" and like those films the humour is largely organic, stemming from the characters and not the situations. There are scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny while others will move you to tears and it's beautifully written, (by Bob Nelson), and played, not just by Dern and Forte but also by June Squibb, (Nicholson's wife in "About Schmidt"), as the foul-mouthed mother, Stacy Keach, in a stunning return to form, as Dern's old friend and nemesis and a whole load of faces so lived in they don't seem to belong to actors but the people they are playing.

Payne chose to shoot  "Nebraska" in monochrome, conjuring up images and memories of a past literal and cinematic. In that respect it sits well beside Bogdanovitch's tributes to Ford and earlier cinema, "Paper Moon" and "The Last Picture Show" as well as a number of classic Ford films going all the way back to "The Grapes of Wrath".  It's as good as anything I've seen this year and it confirms Payne as a master.