About Schmidt

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A dark comedy that's as emotionally honest as any picture of 2002.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Ever the satirist, Payne mines humor from his characters, be it Randall's cockeyed pyramid-scheme ideas or the banality of a ridiculous wedding toast.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A quiet, heart-rending masterpiece, one with an actor's turn that people will remember, and rediscover, eons into the future.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

What makes this exquisitely observed slice of American screen realism transcend itself is finally its moral sensibility.

Newsweek David Ansen

This powerfully contained, painfully funny performance has to rank with the greatest work Nicholson's ever done -- This road movie gives you emotional whiplash, and you’ll be glad you went along for the ride.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

What gives About Schmidt its ultimate boost, what pushes it into the stirring heavens is Nicholson, who produces the most understated -– and one of the most powerful –- performances of his career.

LA Weekly John Powers

The bleakness and poignancy are inescapable in About Schmidt, a character study that has the emotional richness of the great Italian and Eastern European films of the 1960s, in which humor and pathos rode up and down on the seesaw together.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

A comedy poised on the knife's edge of tragedy, the film is a gutsy, truthful, deeply rooted vision of contemporary American life, scaled to the size of an ordinary man. It's a humanist triumph strip-mined of bathos and confirmation that, after directing just three features, Payne has become the most gifted comic social satirist to hit our movies since Preston Sturges.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

What makes About Schmidt so extraordinary is how ordinary its tale is; it's a gray picture about gray people looking for some kind of meaning in their gray lives.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Payne achieves an impressive control over the look and tone, so that, melancholy as the movie is, it comes off as both comedy and comment on the human condition.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

It is also Nicholson at his bravest and riskiest. By banking his fires and staying alert to the smallest details, he delivers a monumental performance that blasts your expectations and batters your heart.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

A seriously good movie, a challenge to viewers, a rebuke of the way many Americans live their lives.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

This is a superb film and one of Nicholson's great performances, tamped down but magnetic.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The power of this great movie -- part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, mostly masterpiece -- is in the details.

Time Richard Schickel

Sublime and sorrowful movie.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

As sad and poignant and potentially hopeful as it is amusing. The movie is our story as much as it is Schmidt's, no matter if it's viewed as a self-reflection or cautionary tale

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

There's still nothing quite as thrilling on the screen as the spectacle of an icon movie star in a perfectly tailored role.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

We laugh, yes, but we're touched, too, a delicate balance that the film manages again and again, right through to its bittersweet conclusion.

Film Threat Darrin Keene

This is where Payne shines. Schmidt’s Winnebago journey through America’s heartland is more like a personal voyage into his Heart of Darkness.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Payne, the great satirist behind "Citizen Ruth" and "Election," loves to populate his films with throwaway details, which in About Schmidt accumulate into a portrait of Midwestern life that's almost chilling in its exactitude.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The movie isn't just about Schmidt as a personality, it's a portrait of his world, and Payne and co-writer Taylor show a rare compassion for the superficially comfortable.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

About Schmidt is billed as a comedy. It is funny to the degree that Nicholson is funny playing Schmidt, and funny in terms of some of his adventures, but at bottom it is tragic.

USA Today Mike Clark

Nicholson has at least three magnificent moments in Hour 2. The best is a wedding toast that comes after another that will painfully remind you of every banal wedding toast you've ever heard.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Stands as a poignant marker in the career of a major artist.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

One may not realize how truly sad this movie is until the forlorn final moments, when Payne resists an inspirational closer, and, with exquisite tact, averts his eyes.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Films exist for different reasons, and the indisputable raison d'etre for About Schmidt is to showcase Jack Nicholson giving a master class in the art of screen acting.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Nicholson makes the movie so poignant that it's hard to resist, but I wonder if Payne and Taylor are rejecting the skeptical attitudes of their other films to become more popular, hoping a softer emotional tone will help this picture win the Oscars that have eluded their more tough-minded works.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

I recommend the movie both for Nicholson's performance and for the opportunity to spend some time with the kind of man that we often meet in real life, but rarely see on screen.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A must-see for Nicholson's mesmerizing performance, which would probably hold interest even if the sound were turned off.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

How you feel about About Schmidt may depend in large part on how you feel About Jack.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Much more deserving of plaudits is the secondary cast--Hope Davis as Schmidt's resentful daughter, Dermot Mulroney as the waterbed salesman she's engaged to, and, above all, Kathy Bates in a hilarious turn as the latter's New Age mother.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

This ambitious, entertaining movie, which showed at film festivals earlier this year, has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece worthy of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman or Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt. Yet its social comments are stained by condescension, and its uplift is sustained by sentimentality that Mr. Nicholson's prickly Everyman can't conceal.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

The pathos of About Schmidt -- of the careful, Chekhovian work that it could have been --gradually slides away. [16 December 2002, p. 106]

Slate David Edelstein

Payne's movie is flat, depressed, and at times -- given this director's talent -- disappointingly curdled; it needs every quivering molecule of Nicholson's repressed rage to keep it alive and humming.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

It’s the difference between artistry and knowingness. About Schmidt doesn’t bring us deeply into the lives of its people because it’s too busy trying to feel superior to them.

TV Guide Ken Fox

The writing is sharp and often blithely cynical, although not above using a shooting star to put a lump in the throat. The tone, however, is at times dangerously uncertain.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

The truth is About Schmidt offers only the sporadic laugh, the less frequent original cultural insight and, at best, a craftsmanlike performance from its aging headliner. The truth is there are long stretches in the picture that are unequivocally dull.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

Had Payne the grace or generosity to present the vulgarity and naiveté and tackiness of these characters as something vital and endearing and delightful, the movie might have been explosively funny.