A different kind of road-trip movie: Alcoholic Bruce Dern and son journey to a strange place in ‘Nebraska’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Jan. 4, 2014

At the start of director Alexander Payne’s new film, Nebraska, a stubborn and elderly alcoholic is bent on traveling from his home in Montana to Lincoln. Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) is convinced that by doing so, he can claim a million-dollar prize he has won through the mail from a sweepstakes company.

Woody’s wife, Kate (June Squibb), knows that this is a scam. So does his elder son, newscaster Ross (Bob Odenkirk). So does his other son, David (Will Forte), a salesman who has been spinning his wheels at work and at home; we see him failing to close a sale on a home stereo system and failing to persuade his long-term girlfriend that he’s made a mistake by moving out of the apartment they used to share.

Woody and David have a lot in common. Like his younger child, the Grant paterfamilias is adrift and ambivalent about the circumstances and direction of his life. If Woody, with his uncombed white hair and slovenly dress, is more battered than David, that seems to be mainly because the elder man has had more years to accumulate dents and bruises.

So once Woody makes it clear that he intends to travel to Lincoln by hook or by crook, David decides to indulge his father. Over Kate’s loud protestations, the pair set out on an 850-mile road trip to the state capital of Nebraska.

Eastwood survives lynching, but ‘Hang ’Em High’ leaves me cold

Many many (many many) years ago, when I was a student, my college had a film program called Sunday Night Flicks. (Films were also shown with varying frequency on Monday and Tuesday and Thursday nights, but be that as it may.) The movies were a mix of recent hits, usually light fare, and classics.

One of those classics was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the seminal 1996 “Spaghetti Western” directed by Sergio Leone and memorably scored by Ennio Morricone. It was a gritty but humorous adventure film, and — for a few hours, at least — it kindled some interest in me about Westerns.

The star of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, of course, is the iconic actor Clint Eastwood. A celluloid immortal for his performances as a Western white hat and later as Dirty Harry, the violent San Francisco cop, Eastwood has also crafted an impressive career as a director, with 35 films to his credit. (He starred in many but not all of those movies.) Eastwood’s odd ad-libbed speech at this year’s Republican National Convention, of course, also secured the former California mayor a permanent footnote in the annals of American politics. 

But that’s a post for some other blog. In a recent canvass of second-hand bookstores, I came across a Clint Eastwood Western twofer DVD and snapped it up. The first of the films that I watched on the disc was a 1968 Eastwood picture I had never seen before, Hang ’Em High. (In truth, I’ve seen very few of his movies.)

Eastwood stars here as cowboy Jed Cooper, who has just driven a newly purchased herd of cattle across a river when he is accosted by a posse. They accuse him of killing the cattle’s rightful owner and rustling the herd; Cooper, a former lawman, protests his innocence. He produces a bill of sale and describes the man who sold him the herd. But the description doesn’t match that of the dead man, and the posse strings up Cooper.