My wife and I finally caught up to Nebraska, the last of the Best Picture Oscar nominations that I had not yet seen. It a simple little story about old age dementia, in which a son humors his age-addled father by driving him to Lincoln, Nebraska so he can “claim” a million dollar prize from a common magazine subscription scam he’s been fooled by. The dialog is realistic but sparse and a bit dull, and character development is minimal and unsatisfying. There are aspects of the film which I guess are somewhat sweet, but it’s mostly a depressing spectacle about how horrible it is to grow old in our society unless you have a lot of money. Even the lauded camera-work and cinematography are just okay. About the only thing I enjoyed in this film is Bruce Dern’s performance; I am now officially rooting for him to win the Best Actor Oscar (he won’t), just because I love the idea of such a completely unsexy character taking home the top prize! It really is a lovely performance by Dern, loaded with a nuanced tenderness that makes him the only character in the film that you actually like. Oh, and I also enjoyed seeing a very brief cameo by the ever-memorable “Cammi” (Missy Doty) from Sideways.

In certain circles, this film is being praised for its radical social content. I found this quite an exaggeration, bordering on wishful projection. Basically its social content is a broad-brush depiction of rural America as a bunch of impoverished, inebriated clowns who essentially do nothing but say stupid things to each other and waste time in various ways. Setting aside the fact that this is a distinctly unhelpful generalization, if we assume that it contains certain elements of the truth, the film still has absolutely nothing to say about how they got this way, why they are so paralyzed, why they drink so much, or how they really feel about their lives. Sure there’s a lot of poor, desperate people in America, but the impoverished state of these particular characters makes little impression because they are so buffoonish no viewer would ever want to associate themselves with them long enough to have a interesting thought about any provocative commonality; even the idea of the poor dreaming of magically becoming rich has no force because it is sublimated via the dementia storyline.

We were sitting in an audience of old people who were howling with laughter at all the contempt-filled sniping between the various elderly characters in the film, especially Dern and his wife, played by June Squibb. If this makes you think you might enjoy Nebraska, by all means go for it. Otherwise, I really don’t think there is enough here to warrant paying to see it in a theater.