HAVING MORE THAN ONE SENIOR MOMENT WITH "NEBRASKA"

Nebraska (2013)   We fell for this movie........even when we suspected it was dryly mocking some of its characters.......

            Firstly, we're a shameless sucker for any movie shot in widescreen black & white.......(back in the day, major directors and big studios weren't afraid to embrace this strange clash of expansive screen size combined with monochrome visuals.....)

             Aha.... that remembrance qualifies as our first senior moment in this post.....

             Like many of those films swirling around in our addled memory, the widescreen b & w in "Nebraska" works to combine to the remoteness of wide open landscapes with the remote, emotional aridity of the people who populate them.

               And nobody's more remote than Woody (Bruce Dern), an aged, dementia-afflicted alcoholic who's convinced himself that a typical "You Won A Million Dollar" piece of junk mail is the real thing......

               What a relief........so far, that's a senior moment that hasn't hit us. Yet.

               But watching Bruce Dern incredibly inhabit this role-of-a-lifetime brought back a flood of memories of watching all of Dern's unforgettable supporting roles throughout the 60's and 70's......

                With this role, Dern has taken a busy lifetime of playing oddballs, loons, and assorted crazed losers and rolled them into one single lonely damaged man at the end of his days....... (unlike the showy, showstopping work of his younger days,, Dern brings quiet, reflective, heartbreaking nuance to Woody......it's film acting at the very peak of excellence.)

                 Oops there goes another senior moment.......remembering far back to the days when only Bruce Dern could convincingly play a villain who murders the living monument John Wayne.....smack in the middle of a John Wayne movie........

                  And we audibly winced watching Dern's walking gait in "Nebraska"......in which his body lists and tilts from side to side, like an old rowboat tossed around in choppy waters..........we imagined that's how we must look as we stagger though the final minutes of a long early morning walk.

                  But enough of our senior moments......better to remember the best ones in "Nebraska", including the forever scene-stealing June Squibb as Woody's unrelenting, sharp-tongued wife.....(more or less the same role she played as Jack Nicholson's wife in "About Schmidt", but this time surviving the entire length of the film........with ample scenes to deliver a barrage of withering observations and put-downs....)

                   Sometimes comic, sometimes brutally hurtful, (and yes, every so often, too close for comfort, bringing us back to our own sad days caring for a parent with dementia)......4 stars. (****)

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