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January 12, 2003
About Schmidt
People grumbled and complained when Jack Nicholson refused to "act his age" a while back, so he is now and it's pretty good to see. The character he plays in this one is newly retired and simmering with a sort of impotent rage that Nicholson's able to bring forward really well. Schmidt is an angry, aging chipmunk.
Outside of Nicholson's performance, the movie does a great job of conveying the alien and sometimes repulsive feel of other people well into their lives. Schmidt is confronted with grotesque in-laws, but their grotesqueries are less an absolute state than they are a reflection on how different other people can be, how uncomfortable it is to be alone in a crowd, and how unlikely it is that our lies to the contrary will go undetected by anyone who knows us.