Nebraska

I felt like a kid back in 1939, seeing The Wizard of Oz for the first time and being so disappointed at the black and white of the opening scenes, having looked forward so much to my first experience with the new-fangled Technicolor. But then Dorothy and Toto landed in Oz and the magical colors began. We just saw Bruce Dern in Nebraska. It could have been filmed only in black and white. From Billings, Montana, to South Dakota and down to Hawthorne, Nebraska. It could only be in black and white. The starkness of that prairie land, the desolation of those little towns along the way, the shabbiness of the houses and Main Street stores. It had to be in black and white. People not from one of those Midwestern prairie states wouldn’t be able to identify with this film the way that I and Rosalie could. After the closing credits, when we were all leaving the theatre, we heard people all around us telling others what state they were from—Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, the Dakotas—and chuckling over their shared memories of growing up in places exactly like Hawthorne, Nebraska. Just as the Coen brothers had to make Fargo in black and white, Nebraska also had to be. Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) was also a study in black and white, with wispy feathers of gray hair blowing in the chill winter breeze, gray scraggly beard, enough gray nose hair protruding that it could have been braided. And all the relatives were black and white characters, with black and white lives behind them and black and white lives in front of them. Aside from the many laughs the audience got from Woody’s foolish quest to get the million dollars he thought he’d won, this was a most depressing film depicting empty lives and lost dreams. The landscape featured fallow fields and deserted backroads, leafless black trees silhouetted against gray skies. Woody’s wife Kate (June Squibb) and their two sons David (Will Forte) and Ross (Bob Odenkirk) visited the old homestead house outside of Hawthorne where Woody was born and grew up. It was a shell with broken furniture and peeling walls and I could almost smell the dust and mold and decay. It was like Woody’s life, empty and decaying and just waiting to collapse. Three adjectives for this film: funny, good (especially Dern’s depiction of Woody), depressing.