Word: warrens
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...Warren Schmidt moves ponderously. This is not because Jack Nicholson, who plays him to perfection, is particularly weighty or out of shape for a 66-year-old man. What slows him is the rhythms of his region and his culture; he is a Midwesterner of the Wasp persuasion, which means he is solid, stolid and silent, except when exchanging arm's-length pleasantries with his friends. Like so many men of his class and place, he has bent himself to a job (as an insurance company actuary) that is at once dull and intricate and to a city (Omaha...
...speaking of denial, I had forgotten that men like Warren Schmidt still exist, even though they are my people. I was raised among them, though I fled their phlegmish company decades ago to join the chattering classes. Once in a while I read something that evokes them--Evan S. Connell's lovely novels about Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Garrison Keillor's sweet-savage Lake Wobegon comedies--but an air of reminiscence touches those works. I guessed that television, the Internet, the jet planes that could whisk these characters to Europe overnight, had long since thawed their taciturnity, granted them full...
...should have known better. After all, some of my old high school buddies still do pretty good Warren Schmidt imitations. So the first and most lasting surprise about Alexander Payne's About Schmidt is finding its protagonist unaltered by the passing years. The street he lives on still looks like the street where I grew up. His ability to turn potential drama into manageable banality remains unchanged...
...every clumsy word has driven Jeannie into deeper resentment, we wonder if finally he will find the gumption to break the habit of polite dissimulation. What gives us hope is a character we never see. His name is Ndugo. He's a 6-year-old Tanzanian boy whom Warren sponsors with a $22-a-month contribution to Childreach. The charity encourages donors to write their "adoptees," and to this child Schmidt pours out all the suppressed secrets of his heart. We begin to think, Well, maybe...
Robert Orsi, Warren professor of the history of religion in America and a specialist in Catholicism, said Hehir’s scholarly work might also hurt...