EDITORIAL

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here is no American dream come true or to be pursued in the latest, magnificent film by Alexander Payne. Nebraska tells a story of ordinary people, of paltry lives, of the insignificant, anonymous American outskirts. A slightly absent-minded old man (an outstanding Bruce Dern), convinced he has won the lottery while what he is holding is just the advertisement for a scam, tries repeatedly to set out on foot to get from Montana to far-off Lincoln in Nebraska, where he believes he will receive a million dollars. His wife and elder son, exasperated, would like to put him into a home but the more sensitive younger son David, who has the sweet, sincere face of Will Forte, decides to ignore his own troubles and, in order to humor his father’s whim, drives him on a long journey towards the non-existent winnings.

There are none of the spangles and the excesses – to which Hollywood has accustomed us – and not even the breathtaking landscapes of the vast American open spaces; this slow road movie in black and white totally lacks such seductive aspects, and yet this film, balanced between comedy and drama like the lives of all of us, captures us, makes us ponder and leaves us with a bitter-sweet taste.

The America that repeatedly offers glossy stories of wealth this time brings us the simple fairytale of a son who decides to go along with his father’s irrationality in a film that focuses on the lives of losers, where a gesture of love seems to be the only antidote to the emptiness and the underlying sense of time that solves nothing and passes in vain. Essentially what reaches us, and what leaves us bewildered, is a message for our increasingly dehumanized world, dominated by egoism: the rediscovery of a new humanism.