I begin to feel like I've said about as much as I can about this demoralizing film. Not its director's best work, it will be remembered more for the performance of the powerful Jack Nicholson than for its confused plot and mean social (not political) portraiture: the whole interest is in deciding if Jack has sunk the movie or saved it. I am sure that this overrated movie has had such a long ride entirely through the odd contrast between Nicholson and his role. Rarely has miscasting generated such extraordinary interest: it is a tribute to Nicholson's sheer voltage as an actor. As I said in my own review, Payne Anderson has now moved away from his native Nebraska. His motives are mixed in About Schmidt: he trashes while he sentimentalizes. If he is cruel, sometimes perhaps it is to be kind, but the bad taste lingers on beyond the dubious sentimentality. Comedy can be gentle or it can be cruel. It is important to note the tone of it. Is My Big Fat Greek Wedding "genial and inoffensive"? Not everyone finds it that way. But it certainly is positive.

For more about the tone and the director's attitude toward his milieu, I'll allow some reviewers to speak for me (these can all be found on www.mrqe.com):

Peter Keogh, Boston Phoenix:
"Of course, as in all of this director’s work, that irony is still pretty broad. Isn’t it enough to give Randall a mullet — must he have prematurely thinning hair and a Fu Manchu moustache and sell waterbeds, too? The women characters verge on misogynistic stereotype, as they might in any film that includes in its cast both Hope Davis and Kathy Bates. In the original Louis Begley novel, Schmidt was an urbane, white-shoe New York City lawyer whose intelligence and self-awareness flattered the reader’s sympathy. Here he’s is a schmuck…"

Charles Taylor, Salon:
For all the combinations of tone and style that movies have indulged in, I can't think of one that has attempted smug poignancy (or is it poignant smugness?). That's the tone of "About Schmidt…Like far too much contemporary American movie comedy, "About Schmidt" is all about flattering the audience. A drab visual insult, James Glennon's cinematography is about reducing the Midwest to strip malls and ugly downtowns, overbright superstores and anonymous tracts of suburbs. Here, we are being told, is the land of dullness and convention and routine, where everything has a deadening sameness. Even before you see them, you anticipate the twin La-Z-Boy loungers in the TV room, the floral-pattern bedroom wallpaper, the Sears family portrait on a young executive's desk, the heavy mahogany paneling in the town's "classy" restaurant.

Peter Rainier, New York:
Payne grew up in Nebraska, but on the basis of his films, it would be incorrect to say he feels great affection for his roots; he wants us to know he’s not a rube like the people he puts on display. A director like Jonathan Demme, in Melvin and Howard, could celebrate small-time rural American malcontents and dreamers without feeling the need to cartoonize them. It’s the difference between artistry and knowingness. About Schmidt doesn’t bring us deeply into the lives of its people because it’s too busy trying to feel superior to them.