Nebraska

Nebraska (2013) starts with an old man in Montana taking a promotional letter seriously. Woody believes he has won a million dollars and sets out to walk to Nebraska to collect it. His son agrees to drive him, and the trip takes them into the family's past. It was shot in black and white. Alexander Payne wanted that from the start and it took time to convince the studio; his reason was that colour would prettify the towns and the landscape. Bruce Dern plays Woody and won Best Actor at Cannes in 2013. Will Forte plays the son and June Squibb the mother, whose character carries the sharpest lines in the film. It received six Oscar nominations and won none. Bob Nelson wrote the screenplay, the first of Payne's films he had not written himself. Its best passage is the one where the relatives gather in a living room, nobody says anything, and the television stays on. It runs 115 minutes. Good for: fathers and sons, portraits of small town America, and dry comedy. Less good for: it is very slow and there is barely a plot. The humour is arid, and the depiction of the townspeople reads as condescending to some. Woody's dementia sits behind everything and is never addressed directly.