Pass the Popcorn: Movies from where I Sit

My friend and I saw "Nebraska" yesterday afternoon.  As I began watching, to be honest, my heart sank a bit at the black and white, then I was afraid, like "August:  Osage County" it was going to try to take it's humor from profane language instead of earning it.  But as I settled in, the tone of gentle satire won me over.  I was afraid Payne was ridiculing the Midwest, where most of my family still alive resides, but instead, he is showing you how much our judgments about rural and farming and small towns make us miss the dignity and honor of making the best bed to lie in you can in the circumstances.  This family, at first appearing as disfunctional and repellant as the family in "August", reveals itself to be passionate and complicated, tender and kind, behind the veneer of "not caring" or insensitivity.  Bruce Dern is lovely as the confused old man who believes his Publisher's Clearinghouse announcement means he's won a million dollars.  Will Forte is sweet and complicated as his son.  June Squibb is good as the wife who seems to be a monster, but is really at the end of her rope from love not hate.  And Stacy Keach does a nice turn as a fellow trying to take a piece of the pie.

By the end of the film, I felt it honored what seems on the surface to be simple lives, but turns out to be as full of longing and regret as any novel by Tolstoy.  The scene with Dern's old girlfriend in the post office is touching, and reveals the suffering underneath all the watching of TV and stoicism.  And Forte's slow dawning of the complexity of his parents' lives and their imminent deaths is so well acted and everymanish that we take this journey with him, his discovery being that his parents loved and lost, were desperate, had unfulfilled longings and ultimately, that they loved him and his brother as best they could.  It's a lovely film, and true hearted one, and that black and white landscape grew on me, metaphorically, as the deceptive veil to the truth that we all are the same underneath, big city or small town, driving a hybrid or a farm truck.