Last few weeks we have been discussing about elderly heroes & their inspirational stories. We promise to share more such stories as and when we find them. Meanwhile, this week some of our team members happened to watch Nebraska (Hollywood flick). We loved the story so much that we decided to watch the movie & share its review on our blog. You might wonder what is a movie review doing in our blog section here. However, the movie was so good that it forced us to spread the word & we could not resist. The story brings a new dimension to the perception of the life of elderly people. Unlike other flicks of this nature, this one talks beyond the confines of an elderly home care facility or family feuds. It talks of compassion, the bond between a father and son which has its own beauty.
Nebraska is filled with the type of drama many people experience in late life: long-term family tensions, fall out from traumatic experiences, and the injuries to the soul that happen when long-held dreams collide with the disappointment of reality.
Short in black and white, the film’s mood is stark. There is nothing frivolous to distract the viewers from the characters’ quest for meaning, connection, and survival. The movie showcases a stubborn old man having done no retirement planning and, rather, indulging in a wild-goose chase all his life.
Bruce Dern (born 1936) plays Woody Grant, a retired auto mechanic, a Korean war veteran, and a life-long alcoholic who is living in Billings, Montana.
Woody is having some trouble with his cognition (no diagnosis is ever discussed), which leads him to believe that a piece of junk mail soliciting magazine subscriptions is really a notification that he has won a million dollar prize.Woody doesn’t drive anymore, so he tries walking from Montana to Nebraska to collect his money.
After the police retrieve him a couple of times, his exasperated wife, Kate, played by June Squibb (born 1929) asks her sons David and Ross to intervene. David, played by Will Forte (born 1970), decides to drive his father to Lincoln, Nebraska so that Woody can see first-hand what the sweepstakes prize really entails.
As father and son embark on their road trip, the viewers see the layers peel back on this old, cantankerous man to reveal a more complex person.
On the way to Lincoln, Woody and David stop in Hawthorne, Nebraska, the town where Woody grew up, married, and started his family before moving to Montana when his boys were still children. A good portion of the film is located in this small town.
Through adult eyes, David examines his father’s past by talking to a handful of people central to his father’s life: his brother Ray, his sister-in-law Martha, his business partner, Ed, and his high school sweetheart, Peg. Each of these people tells David things about his father that he never knew–some good, some bad. And through their revelations and a few stray comments Woody makes about himself, David’s understanding of his father deepens.
As many have noted, this is a slow-paced film. However, the spaces gave us the opportunity to examine the characters and their relationships with each other and connect to it in our real life. There are no chase scenes, no burning building, and no dramatic rescues–at least not overtly. But there is plenty of drama as decades’ long dreams and grudges clash when Woody reconnects with people from his past.
Besides depicting about the elderly life drama, the movie also focuses upon father son relationship and how it evolves gradually after the son know more about his elderly father. We sincerely recommend watching this movie along with your elderly parents / grandparents since movies like this are indeed very rare.
