Stacy Keach – Movie Musings

Bruce Dern excels in Alexander Payne’s masterful Nebraska

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Bruce Dern (Woody Grant), Will Forte (David Grant), June Squibb (Kate Grant), Bob Odenkirk (Ross Grant), Stacy Keach (Ed Pegram), Mary Louise Wilson (Aunt Martha), Angela McEwan (Peg Nagy), Rance Howard (Uncle Ray), Devin Ratray (Cole), Tim Driscoll (Bart)

Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) is an ageing alcoholic on the edge of senility. Receiving a circular from a magazine company, he becomes convinced he has won a million-dollar sweepstake – despite his family telling him he definitely hasn’t. Eventually, son David (Will Forte) agrees to drive him to Lincoln, Nebraska, to ‘claim’ the prize. Along the way, they visit Woody’s family in Hawthorne, Nebraska – and the whole town swallows whole the idea that Woody has won the sweepstakes. Despite the best efforts of David, his mother Kate (June Squibb) and brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), both family members and townsfolk come forward with claims for this fictional money. All this while the family themselves come to understanding about each other and their past.

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is gently paced, meditative, but has lasting impact. Shot in a gorgeous black-and-white, this is a road movie, an odd buddy film, a family drama and a comedy of misunderstandings. All this comes together, in a way perhaps only Payne could do it, into something that at first seems like a bitter-sweet look at a dysfunctional family, but slowly reveals itself into something far more heartfelt than you expect. Nebraska carefully builds a portrait of a family that feuds, but is fundamentally loyal, even while carrying private resentments.

It all revolves around Woody himself, who at first seems to be the typical bad Dad: distant from his sons, dismissive of his wife, a history of drinking. His marriage to Kate seems based more on longevity rather than any love. Approaching senility has only accentuated, it seems, his stubbornness and self-obsession. He’s crochety and fixated on his own needs. But, despite all this – and this is a huge credit to Dern’s sympathetic performance – there is a gentleness to him. For all his negatives, he’s vulnerable and even naïve. He assumes people are telling him the truth. Later Kate will angrily denounce his grasping family, has Woody never said ‘no’ to anything he was asked to for. And you can believe it. He is a character who we see in more and more of a human light.

It comes across in the relationship with David. In an equally beautifully judged performance by Will Forte, David’s motivations for this road journey change. At first it seems an attempt to end an idee fixee, but it becomes more and more about spending time with a man he realises he loves more than he thought. Perhaps that’s because Forte’s sad-sack gentleness has more of an echo of the inner meekness of Dern’s Woody. David has more than a few similarities to Woody – a disappointing career, a failed relationship (unlike Woody’s generation, separation is a lot more feasible), a sense that his life has been a disappointment. But Payne’s film flourishes, because it becomes about David’s discovery of a kindred with his father he hasn’t acknowledged for years.

A lot of that comes from seeing the world his father grew up. A small American town, with more than a touch of The Last Picture Show, where everyone seems either stuck-in-a-rut or happy to drift. Everyone knows everyone, and there are no entertainments except feuds and sharing every piece of gossip. But, above that, David also discovers more about his father’s background: his hopes and dreams, his acts of kindness but also his acts of selfishness. His awkward relationship with his family, and the reasons behind his dysfunctional but strangely contented relationship with his wife.

All this comes together in that very Payne-ish way that is both heart-warming, slightly sentimental but genuinely moving. Above all it works, because everyone one in it feels very relatable and true. David is a highly understandable guy, a quiet fellow who hasn’t quite cracked how life works, but wants to rekindle a relationship with his father. Woody wants to cling to anything that might help him feel he has control over his own life. The saga of the fictional money starts as an item pushing the two men apart, but actually draws them closer as others in the town seek to take advantage (most nastily, the excellent Stacy Keach, claiming to be a former business partner).

That’s what helps make, what could have been a comedy about a clueless Quixote and his reluctant Sancha Panza, into something really moving. Payne may tease Woody – and even allow him to say some quite unpleasant things (his indifference as a young man to having children is a tough thing for any father to say to his son) – but he never makes him a joke. He’s just a man who seems to be looking back at his life, not quite sure how he got there. With David as an audience surrogate, wondering the same thing in turn – and half wondering whether he is going the same way.

And, of course, the film is funny. Woody and David make a wonderful flying trip to Mt Rushmore (“It looks unfinished…Lincoln hasn’t even got an ear” is Woody’s summary of it). June Squibb is very funny as David’s surprisingly foul-mouthed mother, for whom a road trip is a wonderful chance to remember all the conquests she might have made back in the day. David’s constant pleas for Woody to not mention his “win” – and the town’s total buying of this urban rumour – is very well done.

But it mixes with genuinely moving moments. Squibb’s Kate may be frustrated and fed-up with Woody, but she will defend him to the end and tenderly kisses his forehead while he sleeps. It mixes with genuine touches of regret: the extended Grant family sit and watch football together, mutely starring at the television, barely communicating. This isn’t nostalgic, but it is faintly sad about how life so quickly life can trap us into familiar patterns.

And the performances are of course sensational. Dern is incredibly heartfelt, communicating huge amounts of little dialogue and watery eyes. Fonte is superb as a man who believes he has had enough of his father, only to have his perceptions change. Squibb is both funny and heart-breaking, Odenkirk exasperated but tender, Keach a bully scared of his own empty life. It’s one of Payne’s signature works, a gentle character study that starts giving you one perception and develops into giving you a very different one. It’s one of his finest films.

Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges excel as boxers failing to live The Dream in Fat City

Director: John Huston

Cast: Stacy Keach (Billy Tully), Jeff Bridges (Ernie Munger), Susan Tyrell (Oma Lee Greer), Candy Clark (Faye), Nicholas Colasanto (Ruben), Art Aragon (Babe), Curtis Cokes (Earl)

The American Dream has an underbelly. For all those dreamers who find fame, fortune and glory in the Land of Free there are thousands who never made it. Thousands who stayed rooted at the bottom of the rung of the ladder and saw their dreams disappear and lives head into turnaround. Fat City – the good life, according to the slang of San Francisco, the crazy goal you’ll never achieve – is all about those left behind by their dreams.

Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) is a former boxer, now down on his luck and now possibly struggling with alcoholism. Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) is a young prospect who shows some promise in the ring. Both of them dream of getting into the limelight – but what hope do they have when it’s nearly impossible to turn your life around in smalltown America?

John Huston’s film is unflashily assembled, but carries a fundamental emotional power as it investigates with a simplicity and honesty the difficult dynamics of real life. It’s a film which has no pat answers, no simple solutions and doesn’t offer much in the way of hope. Which is not to say that it is a depressing vision of the world. Just a recognisable one. Because, sure, for most of us there isn’t any real chance of seeing our lives change.

Huston’s film – brilliantly shot with a 1970’s muddy graininess mixed with flashes of revealing light by Conrad Hall – is wonderfully well observed and beautifully paced and keeps refreshingly loyal to its essentially downbeat vision of life. There is nothing forced in Huston’s well-paced touch and his embracing of the ordinariness of the drama and the lives of the characters. Because for both of them what we see in this film – and it ain’t much – is still clearly the high point of their life. Just getting into the ring and being beat (and only one fight in the film ends with one of our heroes winning – and even then he’s unaware of his win, he’s so punchdrunk) makes them something rather than nothing. These small moments are the best they can hope for.

Because both men have lives of nothingness in front of them. Keach’s Tully is a man whose best years are already behind them, but keeps up a touching air of hope and belief that maybe that could change, even while he drunkenly stumbles from one moment to the next. And maybe he did have something in the past – but he certainly doesn’t have something to come. Keach captures this superbly – like a reliable pro embracing what he feels might be the highlight of his career – investing Tully with a gentleness but also touch of fantasy, a man who can’t quite accept where his life is, but despite a lack of bitterness he’s still a man balancing fantasies.

Jeff Bridges makes a perfect balance to this amiable failure of a man as Ernie, a young man who may well have more promise than Tully but lacks any sense of personal drive. He’s a friendly but empty shell. While Tully at least goes through spells of wanting success – even if he drifts and falls into alcoholic patches of non-achievement and becomes lost in recollections – Ernie has no desire. He’ll allow himself to be put forward but will do no work at all to push himself forward. He’s a young man with no hurry, a man who seems destined to never achieve anything because he has no desire to do so. It’s a great performance of amiable emptiness from Bridges.

But then you hope that Ernie won’t be heading to the alcoholism that consumes Tully and his romantic interest Orma. Played by an Oscar-nominated Susan Tyrell, Orma is the picture of a failed life, a semi-bloated, rambling alcoholic who oscillates between small insights and far more common drunken ramblings and bitter drunken whining but believes strongly in what she does. Huston’s film places her firmly as much of a drifter through life as Ernie in her way, taking up with Tully while her lover serves prison time – and moving easily and with little impact from one domestic set-up to another. Tyrell and Keach give outstandingly strong performances of drunkenness, never over-playing and totally convincing in their slurred speech, attempts to not appear as drunk as they are and emotional swings from calm to sudden and consuming fury.

But then what is there to look forward to in this life than the next drink? Certainly not the fights. For all the dreams of trainer Ruben (Nicolas Colosanto – very good) to find the next big thing, every fight we see is a tragic and painful affair mostly ending in defeat. Ruben drives carfuls of beaten, ring fodder from place to place, watches them get duffed up and then takes them home all the while dreaming of a title shot. It is dreams shared by Tully – even while we watch his slow, alcoholic fuelled body struggle to get through a few minutes of shadow boxing.

But then that’s the message of Fat City the anti-Rocky – and probably more realistic for it. Huston;s simple touch and pure vision help to make this one of his finest films, his unfussy and naturalistic camera encouraging truthful and powerful performances from his leads. And every small moment is full of it, including a marvellous wordless sequence that sees Tully’s Mexican opponent arrive in town (on a rundown bus), wordlessly check into a motel, piss blood and then head to the ring to be (only just) beaten – a moment of victory so fleeting and small it barely counts (and is only a hiatus on Tully’s return to shambling from bar to bar on the streets). The American Dream is a great thing – but for many people it’s just that: a dream.