LOOKING FOR LAUGHS IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

If you do not mind sad movies and can stand a good cry, go see About Schmidt.

From a technical standpoint, the movie does not deserve more than a “B.” Nicholson, of course, is masterful. But, big chunks of the film are trite, predictable, even pedantic. So, forget technicalities.

About Schmidt is a profound tragedy about realizing near the end of ones days that life has been neither moral nor immoral, but simply empty. Schmidt has occupied the shank of his adulthood in the bland, monochromatic world of an insurance actuary. He retires to discover not only that his days are vacuous, but also that his wife of 43 years is annoying and fussy. His wife suddenly dies, and his life becomes even emptier. He tries solitude, not so much by choice as by default, but he is deafened by the silence. He hooks up with his daughter’s fiancé’s wacky family, but they are even more annoying than his wife was and even more vacuous than his aloneness. Even his daughter rejects his long delayed overtures.

Like I say, a tragedy of momentous proportion.

Schmidt’s only salvation is in the rambling, self-revelatory letters he sends to an impoverished African orphan child, whom Schmidt has adopted for $22 a month via one of those “help the children” infomercials. Eventually, the six-year-old sends him back a stick-figure drawing conveying the most basic feeling of friendship. Schmidt cries and finally, nearly too late, he discovers his humanity.

Were the story entirely without humor, the tragedy would be devastating, redeemed only in the final scene, so the movie has its funny moments. (Try Nicholson’s face at his daughter’s wedding rehearsal or Kathy Bates’ grotesque flash of nudity.) But, let there be no mistaking. This is a powerfully painful story.

Having abdicated my pulpit, I no longer push myself to seek out Biblical parallels or homiletic inspiration in books and movies, but this time I cannot help waxing sermonic: Is not the pain in watching Schmidt’s emptiness simply a function of looking in the mirror at our own emptiness? Slogging through our pallid jobs to earn modest pay and meager gratification? Finding only annoyance in our daily encounters, even in those nearest to us? Deafened by our solitude?

If redemption is ever to be found, it will be discovered only in the simplest acts of kindness, the acts that restore others to humanity, who, in turn, help us discover our own. My fantasy about Schmidt is that he might even start attending church and realize that the wholeness he finally found through giving and receiving humanity is a gift that emanates directly from God.

About Schmidt is about you and me.

Or, is it?

My heart was repeatedly wrenched by the pain and pathos of this story unfolding on the screen. I was even brought to tears, unusual for me. But, at most of the movie’s most poignant, heart-wrenching moments, I swear to you that a majority of that matinee audience laughed, including the hyena sitting directly behind me.

Did I miss something? Are my visual and emotional filters so badly askew? Maybe sometimes, but in this case I think not.

I could doff it off as being surrounded by stupid people in a stupid place, or that they laughed the nervous, hypersensitive laughter that people occasionally laugh when they are faced by situations too difficult to bear. But I tell you, this was the yuk-yuk laughter of comedy . . . and it was comedy that I could not see.

I hate to think the worst: that this is the laughter that emanates from a profound absence of empathy, the inability to see in the pain of others the possibility of our own pain, the cruelty not of the aggressor but of the person who sees a human being’s tragedy and finds only humor in his pathetic situation.

Perhaps that is the most tragic emptiness of all. You tell me.