About Schmidt (film)

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Movie
German title About Schmidt
Original title About Schmidt
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2002
length 125 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
JMK 0
Rod
Director Alexander Payne
script Alexander Payne,
Jim Taylor
production Michael Besman ,
Harry Gittes
music Rolfe Kent
camera James Glennon
cut Kevin Tent
occupation
synchronization

About Schmidt is a tragicomedy from the year 2002 by director Alexander Payne with Jack Nicholson in the lead role. The script is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Louis Begley (German book title: Schmidt ).

action

The 66-year-old Warren Schmidt has just finished his last day at the insurance company Woodmen of the World in Omaha , where he was most recently a department head and actuary . In the evening they meet in a pub for an impersonal farewell party, where his young successor assures him that he can come to the office at any time, as you would like to benefit from his specialist knowledge. When he actually does this, he is politely turned away and made it clear to him that he is no longer needed. On leaving, he also notices that his carefully sorted files have all ended up in the trash.

Now, as a pensioner, Warren is confronted with all the things that he hardly had to deal with during his working hours, such as his wife Helen, with whom he has been married for 42 years, or with too much time with which he has nothing to begin knows.

In order to counter the ever increasing feeling of uselessness, he takes on a sponsorship advertised on television through the children's aid organization Plan International for a six-year-old Tanzanian boy named Ndugu , to whom he writes letters, as recommended by the mediation organization, in which he documents private events. The letters to Ndugu become a kind of life confession and writing therapy for Warren. In a letter, Warren admits that his wife often seems strange to him and that almost everything about her now bothers him.

When Warren's wife unexpectedly dies of a blood clot in her brain shortly afterwards , his life turns upside down. He got into an argument with his daughter Jeannie because she accused him of being too stingy with his wife and that he had only chosen a cheap coffin for the funeral. Jeannie has come to the funeral with her fiancé, the simple waterbed seller Randall Hertzel. Hertzel, who is internally rejected by Warren, describes Warren that he plans to make a lot of money with a pyramid scheme. Warren only takes note of this. Warren also learns of his wife's previous affair with best friend Ray, which finally throws him off course. He is slowly becoming neglected, no longer paying attention to his appearance and no longer tidying up the apartment. One day he sets off with the motorhome that he bought shortly before her death at the request of his wife to visit his daughter in Denver , who will soon marry the waterbed seller there. When he happily calls her on the way to announce his arrival, she makes it clear to him that he cannot be needed now and that he should, as agreed, only arrive two days before the wedding. Instead, he now sets off on a journey to the places of his youth and travels to his birthplace Holdrege and the University of Kansas in Lawrence , where he encounters disinterest in the people he addresses.

After a tourist trip to Broken Bow and North Platte , Warren befriends a younger couple at a campsite. When he misunderstood the woman's friendliness and suddenly kisses her, she throws him out of the mobile home in horror. Warren immediately leaves the campsite after this incident and decides to forgive his wife and Ray for adultery.

When he finally arrived in Denver, he lived with Randall's mother. After a dinner with his daughter, Randall, his brother and Randall's divorced father and his second wife, he tries to dissuade his daughter from the marriage because he considers the whole Hertzel family to be completely unsuitable and indecent. However, his daughter makes it clear to him that he has to accept her decision, otherwise he could drive back immediately. The night before the wedding, Randall's mother tries to seduce Warren, which he immediately blocks. The marriage takes place. Schmidt overcomes his anger and gives a very friendly speech to the groom and his family.

On the way home he makes a short stop in Kearney and visits the "Great Platte River Road Archway Monument", a museum built in honor of the pioneers. Back home, he admits that his life must seem unimportant to those around him. His retirement crisis culminates in this insight. As he was collecting the mail from the mailbox, he surprisingly found a letter from Tanzania in it. A nun who looks after his sponsored child writes that Ndugu could not read any of his letters because he was only six years old. But he painted a picture for him as a token of his gratitude. Warren bursts into tears over this and realizes that he could make a difference in his life.

synchronization

The German synchronized editing was done at RC Production Rasema Cibic in Berlin . The dialogue book was written by Klaus Bickert , and the dubbing director was Joachim Tennstedt . As the German voice of Jack Nicholson, Joachim Kerzel received the German Synchronous Award in the category of outstanding male dubbing .

role actor Voice actor
Warren R. Schmidt Jack Nicholson Joachim Kerzel
Jeannie Schmidt Hope Davis Claudia Lehmann
Roberta Hertzel Kathy Bates Regina Lemnitz
Gary Nordin Matt Winston Nicolas Boell
Helen Schmidt June Squibb Christel Merian
John Rusk Harry Groener Uwe Büschken
Larry Hertzel Howard Hesseman Klaus Sunshine
Randall Hertzel Dermot Mulroney Charles Rettinghaus
Randall's best man James M. Connor Jörg Hengstler
Vicki Connie Ray Cornelia Meinhardt
Ray Len Cariou Jochen Schröder

background

  • The scene in which Warren is seen in the bathtub as he fell asleep while writing a letter should be reminiscent of the painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David .
  • In the English original, Warren says his daughter Jeannie speaks German pretty well. In the German synchronization it became Italian.
  • In addition to the actually existing children's aid organization Plan International , Woodmen of the World is also a real insurance company, in whose office skyscraper, the Woodmen Tower in Omaha , Nebraska, was also shot.

Reviews

  • Tobias Kniebe wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung : “So it will be about this man: 'About Schmidt'. That could be funny, which the director Alexander Payne suggests, for example, by the way Schmidt serves the last few seconds. It could be tragic, everything gray on gray, the Midwest stretches endlessly, and in the middle of it a small man - small in the most comprehensive human sense. A director and a superstar making fun of the American provinces again? Nobody needs it. A young Arthur Miller who shows a mouse in the wheel of capitalism once again, haunted to death by the lies of the American dream? Not that exciting either. So in the next few scenes, completely fascinated by Nicholson, one worries about the direction in which the film will develop. And Alexander Payne magically keeps his intentions in the balance, he will be ultra-comical and infinitely sad - but that too, very inconspicuously. "
  • Michael Haberlander wrote on artechock.de: “About Schmidt is a very atypical, deeply human (but in the sense of realistic and not human), mostly amusing and sometimes tragic film. It is gratifying to see not only young, healthy, successful and clever people or to be presented with the cliché of the young at heart, wise, active and wealthy »older fellow citizens«. […] In many ways About Schmidt is also a very courageous film. Not only because he refuses to meet the standards of the beautiful and the successful, but above all because he shows such a negative and hopeless mood right up to the end that is otherwise only known from the socially critical cinema in England, with one crucial difference that the blame for the present misery is not sought and found with the »system«, politics or society, but with (fellow) people. "
  • Harald Fricke wrote in Die Tageszeitung : “Payne gives Nicholson a lot of space so that this transformation doesn't just turn into a parody of the failure of the American way of life. Perhaps too much when you consider that Cathy Bates, as the mother of the future Schmidt son-in-law, has to quickly play through in a few minutes how an ex-hippie chick from the Woodstock era has to feel today between natural food, bonded self-fulfillment and old-age sex Whirlpool. Nicholson, on the other hand, has all the time in the world in 'About Schmidt' when he is lonely on a last road trip in his Winnebago or watching motionlessly as his insurance files - the balance sheet of a working life - end up in the bulky waste after retirement. That he doesn't know what to learn from such moments is again one of the deeply sad insights that Payne's film and Begley's book share. He could roar, even howl, but Nicholson remains silent until the end. Only in the very last minute of the film does the inner tensions dissolve. "

Awards

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating particularly valuable.

literature

  • Louis Begley: Schmidt. (OT: About Schmidt ). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-39500-9 .
  • Thomas Küpper: Crisis and Ambivalence. On the representation of age in Alexander Payne's film About Schmidt . In: Henriette Herwig, Andrea von Hülsen-Esch (ed.): Old people in the film and on the stage. New images of age and roles of age in the performing arts. Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8376-2936-1 , pp. 281-300.
  • Marga Löwer-Hirsch: No, I think I've had enough for today! - About Schmidt . In: Heidi Möller, Stephan Doering (eds.): Batman and other heavenly creatures - Another 30 film characters and their mental disorders. Springer Medizin Verlag, Heidelberg 2010, ISBN 978-3-642-12738-0 , pp. 213-223

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for About Schmidt . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , February 2003 (PDF; test number: 93 004 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for About Schmidt . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ^ About Schmidt. In: synchronkartei.de. German synchronous index , accessed on August 28, 2009 .
  4. ↑ A life that has been served. In: sueddeutsche.de. May 17, 2010, accessed May 11, 2018 .
  5. ↑ http://www.artechock.de/film/text/kritik/a/abschm.htm
  6. ↑ http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/archiv/?dig=2003/02/27/a0182
  7. ↑ German Prize for Synchron 2003 (pdf; 48 kB)