Tin man

Nebraska

Crit

I have often alluded to but never, it seems, comprehensively articulated my philosophy that the only useful cinematic classification system divides all films into two categories:

1. Wizard of Oz films
2. not-Wizard of Oz films

Tonight, when I articulated my philosophy to my companions after this film, some (well, all) of them challenged me to explain why Alexander Payne's new film is self-evidently an Oz movie while About Schmidt and Sideways are not. Which, of course, made me think a lot more about the sine qua nons of the subsubsubsubgenre. A Wizard of Oz film must present us with

1. a naïve protagonist
2. on a quest that
3. remains the central focus of the film, who
4. encounters much that is strange and frightening, and some that is strange and appealing, in his or her travels,
5. is stymied in the precise focus of the quest, but
6. eventually finds something else, something unsought, often something better, including
7. some sort of enlightenment, one result of which is
8. revision of the quest to simply a return home.

I'd also suggest a sliding scale of Oz-ness for certain elements: the more hapless the quest the Ozzier it is, (high points here, low points in both Schmidt [to prevent a bad marriage] and Sideways [to have a male-bonding wine weekend], but, to be fair, also low points in one of the best and Ozziest Oz movies ever, After Hours [getting laid]); the stranger the encounters, the Ozzier (After Hours makes up a lot of lost ground there, and this, with the bizarre family elements, gets more points than the other two Payne candidates).

Bruce Dern brings a defiant dignity to a character whose mental fog could easily have made him jokey, a bunch of nonprofessional actors play the precise midwesterners I grew up with, and Phedon Papamichael's black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous.