“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.
