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:- Wizard of Oz films
- not-Wizard of Oz films
- a naïve protagonist
- on a quest that
- remains the central focus of the film, who
- encounters much that is strange and frightening, and some that is strange and appealing, in his or her travels,
- is stymied in the precise focus of the quest, but
- eventually finds something else, something unsought, often something better, including
- some sort of enlightenment, one result of which is
- revision of the quest to simply a return home.
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.