I searched. Found nothing. Felt free to post my own.
Read the following only if you have seen the movie.
I liked it, though it’s probably not going to be one of my all-time favorites. It was a little too predictable. Yeah, that’s it.
Anyway, Nicholson is one of my favorite actors and he does a great job in this movie, comparable to his work in As Good As It Gets.
I feel the need to share so here’s my take on it:
At the beginning, Schmidt is retiring. He has some (well, at least one) life-long friends at the party, but, after a beautiful speech by his friend Ray on the significance of aging and retirement, goes out to the bar to have a drink. He’s starting to question what his life has meant.
The sudden (though, as aforementioned, predictable [for me, at least] ) death of his wife works very well for the movie. He was starting to get used to used to retirement and his life was casual and, what’s more, her death is not actually shocking. It made sense. She was old, so it’s not surprising that she died.
He grieves, but does so more because of a forced change in life than the emotional attachment he had to her. (For him, however, only the emotional aspect is apparent.)
When he goes on the road trip and has a conversation with the wife of the Happy Man, he realizes what he has wanted all his life. She truly understands him. But, after a lifetime of keeping his true feelings pent up, he is impatient and kisses her. She is obviously furious and his chance is lost.
Through his nighttime tribute speech to Helen, he understands that he must forgive people because, in the end, that’s all there really is to life–being a good person for others (since that’s how a person lives after physical death). He calls his friend Ray to forgive him for the affair, but is frustrated by the newness of the world. His trip to the site of his former home also evokes this feeling of isolation and the coldness of the world. Later on, in a talk with his daughter, he finds that he has largely ignored her.
But he is brought into it forcefully by his soon-to-be son-in-law’s mother when she tells him of her sex life and, even more importantly, his daughter’s sex life. Their conversation occuring as a consequence of his trying to back out of the wedding in an effort to prevent his daughter from marrying the “nincompoop.”
In the end, however, it’s his adopted child that saves him. The kid that he was telling all his problems to, sends him a picture. Schmidt had searched everywhere for understanding. He had found it and lost it.
Ndegu gives him a picture. It is a simple picture: crayon-drawn stick figures of Schmidt and Ndegu holding hands in a sunlit world. The picture represents all the kid really knew about him–that he had provided him with the (financial) support that had allowed him to survive. That idea and only that idea is expressed in the picture. Other people know more about Schmidt but their vision is obcured by other things that they know about him. But Schmidt’s cherished secret is what allows him to be at peace with the world in the end. Far off somewhere, a new life was taking shape thanks to him. He will not know what will become of the boy, but he will know that he lives because of him. Ndegu had done what he could; a seemingly small gift but one that changed the meaning of Schmidt’s life for him and thus changed what Schmidt really was. Schmidt has separated his life into the emotional/social part and the financial part (considering the kid a financial endeavor), but the Ndegu’s picture shows him that everything he does has an effect on others and life is different, more simple, more difficult, than he had imagined. A fitting conclusion.
So what did you guys think of it?
