Alexander Payne's black-and-white father-son road film. Bruce Dern's Best Actor Oscar nomination at age 77. The Nebraska town as cinematic subject rather than backdrop.
Billings, Montana, contemporary. Woody Grant, an elderly retired father with progressive cognitive decline, has received a magazine-sweepstakes mailer that he believes informs him he has won $1 million. His family knows the mailer is a marketing-promotion technique that has not produced any actual prize. Woody, increasingly stubborn about the matter, repeatedly attempts to walk from Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska — where the sweepstakes office is located — to claim his prize. His younger son David, exhausted and concerned, eventually agrees to drive him.
The film tracks the father-son road trip from Billings to Lincoln, with an extended stopover in Woody's hometown of Hawthorne, Nebraska. The Hawthorne sequence — the film's structural centre — involves Woody and David visiting Woody's surviving family and former neighbours, with the broader Hawthorne community progressively learning of Woody's supposed million-dollar win. The film closes with Woody and David's brief Lincoln visit (the mailer is confirmed as a marketing-promotion technique with no actual prize), David's purchase of a new truck for Woody from his own savings, and the closing drive through Hawthorne with Woody, finally, driving the new truck himself.
Nebraska was, by Payne's working decision, shot in black-and-white. The choice was, in 2013 commercial-cinema terms, structurally unusual. Most contemporary mainstream films are released in colour; black-and-white production requires significantly more lighting control and substantially limits the broader cinematographic palette. Payne's argument was that the specific texture of Nebraska's small-town landscape — the agricultural fields, the rural-Midwest cloud formations, the weathered face textures of the elderly cast — would be served by black-and-white in ways that colour photography would not.
The choice produces a specific visual register that distinguishes the film from contemporary American mainstream cinema. The Nebraska of the film is, on screen, neither nostalgic-romanticised (the way black-and-white period drama often handles rural America) nor harshly-realistic. The structural framing is closer to documentary observation — the audience is invited to attend to the specific texture of the landscape and faces in ways the colour register would not have produced. Phedon Papamichael's cinematography was nominated for the Best Cinematography Oscar; the win went to Emmanuel Lubezki for Gravity.
Bruce Dern was 77 during production. The role of Woody Grant required him to play an elderly man whose cognitive decline the film tracks across the runtime without falsifying it. Dern's specific performance is built on small physical and vocal details — the hesitant gait, the slow speech, the moments of unexpected clarity that progressively give way to extended confusion. The cumulative effect is one of the most-respected depictions of progressive elder cognitive decline in mainstream American cinema.
Dern was nominated for Best Actor at the 2014 Oscars. He had not been nominated in the category since Coming Home (1978) — a 36-year gap that is among the longest between Best Actor nominations in Academy history. The nomination was widely received as recognition of a working actor's career-late achievement at the highest dramatic register. Dern lost to Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club.
June Squibb's Kate Grant — Woody's wife and David's mother — is, by general critical consensus, the film's most-distinctive single performance. Squibb was 84 during production. The role required her to play a woman whose specific Midwestern-pragmatist register has been developed across decades of marriage to Woody's progressively-deteriorating cognition. Kate's specific dialogue — the unfiltered observations about deceased townspeople during the Hawthorne cemetery visit, the matter-of-fact recounting of family histories the audience can read as either fact or embellishment — is the film's most-quotable.
Squibb was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 2014 Oscars; she lost to Lupita Nyong'o for 12 Years a Slave. The performance has, in subsequent years, become one of the canonical late-career-actress achievements of the 2010s. The cemetery sequence, in which Kate offers unsolicited commentary on each grave the family visits ('She had nice tits. Skinny but fine. He died of polio.'), has been quoted extensively in subsequent film and cultural writing.