Dark continent

About Schmidt

(2002)

This remains my least favorite of Alexander Payne's first 4 features, but that's hardly a condemnation, and this has plenty about it to like, and even more to admire (for one thing: is Kathy Bates the bravest woman ever to step in front of a camera naked, or what?)

But what I really noticed about this, in screening it for the 3rd time, the 1st in several years, is its set-piece connections to Payne's other films: the ill-conceived seduction, the odd injury source, and the last-act educational diorama of Election; the challenged nuptials of Sideways; the critically timed discovery of a wife's infidelity of the new one, The Descendants. Speaking of Sideways, during Warren's Winnebago odyssey he passes a small-town two-screen movie theater, one side of which is closed for repairs, the other side showing twice nightly a Payne film that was then still 2 years in the future. Don't blink.