In the annals of American directors, Alexander Payne is unique – no one else has ever fought the battle of the sexes with such heretical disdain for conventional roles. Although his output is slim, Oscar has lavished it with attention: Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004) and now The Descendants have all earned nominations in at least one major category. But it’s not the accolades that set his work apart. Instead, there are two crucial distinguishing factors, and the first is less basic than it might seem – his modern-day settings. He never retreats into the past. This year, of the nine entries on the best-picture list, only his is set exclusively in the present. Payne is concerned, obsessively, with the way we live now.
And what does he see? Well, that’s the second and most astounding factor. Over and over again, he sees precisely the same sight: the battered figure of the American male. His protagonists in these films are all men and they’re all losers – failed teachers, failed writers, failed husbands, failed fathers, undone not by the economy (money isn’t their problem) but by broader forces of psychological malaise. The symbolism is easy to read. They are their country in its post-Cold War decline, superego and superpower identically bruised.
By contrast, the women are typically strong, dominant, often domineering, always decisive. What emerges in each case is something close to a matriarchy, yet not one a feminist would likely endorse. Here’s why: Payne is an equal-opportunity debunker and, in his social view, both sexes are similarly guilty of lies, deception, adultery and narcissism. It’s just that women do it so much better – saddled with these unmanly schmoes, they’re more aggressive and confident in the pursuit of their self-interest.
That’s a remarkable, and remarkably gloomy, analysis of modern America. In Sideways, Miles the wannabe writer is repeatedly warned by his so-called buddy: “No going to the dark side.” Yet, that’s exactly where Payne insistently heads; in fact, his best film, Election, is also his darkest by far. A clever twist on the high-school genre, it’s a black satire that doubles as a political parable. There, Matthew Broderick’s Jim McAllister begins as a stalwart teacher and rigorous guardian of all things ethical. Oops, not so rigorous that he doesn’t try to cheat on his wife and rig the election for school president. Problem is, Jim is bad at bad behaviour – he always gets caught.
His nemesis is star student Tracy Flick (a scary Reese Witherspoon), who succeeds everywhere he fails. She has illicit sex with impunity, she cheats with a purpose, she hides her ruthless pragmatism behind a forced smile and sunny clichés. In the end, Jim “loses everything” while Tracy hits the jackpot, a fat job as a congressional aide for a limo-riding Republican.
Her credo is pure social Darwinism – “The weak are always trying to sabotage the strong” – and the fact that the alpha male happens to be a female is entirely characteristic of Payne. You may recall the Kathy Bates character, Roberta, in About Schmidt – large, tough, foulmouthed and predatorily sexual, she’s the queen of the alpha males.
In that movie, the young, pathetic teacher has morphed into the old pathetic Warren Schmidt – played by Jack Nicholson, the once-iconic American male, given a paunch, a comb-over and a wonky back. Warren is long married, and his wife “irritates” him beyond measure even while emasculating him beyond dignity: “For years now, she has insisted that I sit while I urinate.” And sit he does.
As fate would have it, the good woman dies; shortly after, Warren learns that she had cuckolded him with his best friend (a plot trope duplicated in The Descendants). He hits the road, but his only epiphany is his essential worthlessness, news that wouldn’t surprise his strong-willed daughter Jeannie, who’s settling in for a career of running roughshod over her dim-bulb fiancé. Here, the dark ending sees Warren alone and reading a letter from his pen pal, a six-year-old orphan in Africa. The kid has included a crayoned drawing of a stick-figure dad clutching the hand of a stick-figure child. The sad man looks at the hollow man, and weeps.
