Rating of
2.5/4
"Nebraska" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 03/17/16
An elderly man from Montana receives a marketing mail shot that announces that he's "won" a million dollars, so his long-suffering son agrees to take him to Nebraska to claim his prize. Another comic character study from the writer-director of Sideways, Nebraska is a portrait of working class, small town America in which the family cope with the idiosyncrasies of a typically stoic, hard drinking working man. It takes a similar concept to The Straight Story and makes a buddy road movie during which a son comes to terms with the father he has never really known in a lightly comic way. I'm sure there are many who will recognise the character of Woody and Bruce Dern plays him to perfection, supported by a fine cast of quirky characters, including Will Forte as the son trying to bond with a man who shares little and seems to share little in common with him, Bob Odenkirk as his exasperated elder brother and June Squibb as his amusingly forthright mother. It's a very low key affair, shot in black and white with plenty of the local colour of the often unseen working class America and although rather uneventful and ponderous is a consistently amusing and poignant portrait of ordinary people and their ordinary lives.
