The Middle of the Road: Alexander Payne’s Journeys

 “I had been sitting on this Nebraska script even when I did Sideways,” writer-director Alexander Payne said in May 2013. “But I didn’t want to go back to a road-trip movie right after that. I was really tired of shooting people in cars. It’s a drag” (qtd. in Alexander). Despite these misgivings, the filmmaker returns, again and again, to road trips. Recurring throughout Payne’s work is the idea of a pivotal physical pilgrimage that doubles as a journey of self-discovery for his typical protagonist, a damaged but basically good person riddled with unease and inner disenchantment.

In About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004), The Descendants (2011), and most recently Nebraska (2013), Payne cannot help but place his characters on physical, psychological, and emotional journeys, ones that might not have a clear destination but which will take the protagonists—and the viewers—to completely unexpected places. More often than not, origin and destination merge, and the characters end up where they had started; they return home, whether that is symbolized by an actual location or by family connections or romantic relationships. The writer-director utilizes the dynamics of the road movie not to express the more common theme of a yearning for escape, but instead to emphasize the psychological primacy of belonging, establishing and—significantly—accepting one’s true home.

Click HERE for my analysis of Payne’s NEBRASKA: “One for the Money, Two for the Road”

Nebraska (2013): One for the Money, Two for the Road

After making side trips to California’s Central Coast and Hawaii for Sideways (2004) and The Descendants (2011), Alexander Payne takes to the road yet again, this time in his home state, for Nebraska (2013), a wistful ode to small-town Midwestern life and the quixotic dreams of stubborn old men. Payne’s prairie-based old-age odyssey begins, appropriately, on a busy stretch of highway. 

A small, solitary figure shuffles along the side of the snow-fringed road, stooped and scowling in the wind. His determined trudging is interrupted by a police officer, who asks where he’s coming from and where he’s headed. Wordlessly, the old man points back and then forward. This is a man who, like his surroundings, seems to have outlived his usefulness; he has that self-involvement the way someone does when he’s staring death in the face, bobbing and weaving along that highway to avoid his inevitable mortality. His journey is a last, valedictory gesture designed to give meaning to a life. He seems confused, but there’s a heartbreaking purity, a blankness to him, as well as a hunger and a ferocity, that feel terrifyingly real. Without saying a word, he has hit upon a deep and eloquent truth: like the character, that’s all we really know in life—that we came from back there and we’re going forward on the road, regardless of where it might lead, because we have no idea what the end destination is or where we’ll end up anyway. 

NEW: PAYNE'S About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants Analysis HERE

In surprising ways, his odyssey resembles those of Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity, DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Walter Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries (2004). The protagonists of these works are all younger than Payne’s character; they have had different life experiences; they travel different lands. But, through each of their journeys, they seek the same meaningfulness, defining their own identities in relation to others and to their environments, looking for a place they belong, and trying to establish a human connection.