Bruce Dern and Will Forte take a black-and-white road trip from Montana to 🍬“Nebraska,’’ director Alexander Payne’s latest acutely acted and occasionally hilarious seriocomic look at his Midwestern roots.
A magnificent D♔ern plays Woody, an ornery alcoholic whose dementia has reached the point where he actually believes he’s won $1 million in a magazine sweepstakes contest.
When Woody insists on picking up his “winnings’’ in person, his long-suffering son David (a surprisingly effective Forte) agrees to take the old man on the 850-mile trip t🍸o Omaha, hoping to bond at last with his distant parent.
Along the way, they stop in Dad’s small, blighted hometown in Nebraska to visit his siblings and their families — who quickly try to cut themselves in for a portion of Woody’s windfall to cover his pas🥂t debts, no matter how much David insists that the money doesn’t actually exist.
Woody’s꧂ sharp-tongued wife (the wonderful June Squibb) and his older son (Bob Odenkirk) turn up in town for a wildly dysfunctional family reunion. Also demanding money is Woody’s form🐭er partner in a local garage (the great Stacy Keach).
Bob Nelson’s original script, a sort of unlikely cross between “Thဣe Last Picture Show’’ and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,’’ offers a biting satire of Midwestern life that Payne sometimes allows to border on condescension.
What’s missing is enough of the sympathy for his characters that made Payne🐻’s “The Descendants’’ and “Sideways’’ so much more enjoyable.
There are certainly things to appreci🅰ate in the new film, including cinematography that vividly captures a🎃 small town that time, and prosperity, have apparently forgotten.
“Nebraska’’ has enough good lines, scenes and performances to make it worth your while, as well as aꦅ sufficiently upbeat ending to qualify it as holiday entertainment. But I don’t want to oversell an emotionally bleak film that’s been overhyped since it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival.