Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach, Bob Odenkirk, Mary Louise Wilson, Missy Doty, Angela McEwan, Rance Howard, Devin Ratray, Roger Stuckwisch, Tim Driscoll, Glendora Stitt, Elizabeth Moore, Kevin Kunkel, Dennis McCoig, Ronald Vosta, John Reynolds, Jeffrey Yosten, Neal Freudenburg, Eula Freudenburg, Ray Stevens, Lois Nemec, Francisco Mendez, Jose Munoz, Catherine Rae Schutz, Terry Lotrous, Dennis McCave.

If the latter part of 2013 has anything to show for it then the quality of films that have come out in the last six months have been exemplary. None so less as the Alexander Payne film Nebraska.

When Woody Grant, a man whose best years are behind him, like the many bottles of beer he has sank since coming from Korea receives a letter to say that he may have won a prize worth millions and all he has to do is get to Nebraska to pick up the winnings, it sets off a chain of events in which he and his son go on the road. These events are coupled with the realisation of what the father left behind in his home town and the kind of people that inhabit that world, the greed and suffering going hand in hand alongside the memories, both good and bad and why sometimes you should never go back again once you have left.

This film can rank highly and with head high by all concerned in its making and the brave choice to present it in monochrome is to be applauded. Not only is it a stark indictment on the way some parts of America seems to treat its Mid-Western States, treating it as if perhaps an aged parent, not really useful for anything but for putting it in a home and forgetting about it till election time but also the realisation that a film sometimes is actually so much more enjoyable when shown in black and white. It leaves so much more to the imagination whilst giving you a more stark account of what you are seeing.

To have a film of this quality showcasing the natural beauty of the Mid-States is breath taking, even if the stars of the film, the impeccable Bruce Dern, the almost flawless support of Will Forte, Stacy Keach and the brilliant June Squibb, were not enough to make you fall in love with the area stuck between West Coast exploration and East Coast cosmopolitan and chic.  The scenery with the gentle rolling flat fields of Nebraska are enough to want to make you walk from Billings to the ancestral home of the Grant Family and breath in a piece of forgotten history of real America.

Nebraska proves the point, so well made over the years, that an engaging story, one well told and full of charm with actors playing real people, showing the real complexities of emotions that are bound up in the dysfunctional family bond are more than equal to the vast majority of films that deal in the idea that a film has to be sensational to be adored. Whilst the latter part of 2013 has seen an avalanche of films that have carried the viewer beyond expectation, Nebraska is perhaps the most heart-warming of them all, the father and son bond exemplified between Bruce Dern’s excellent Woody Grant and the genuinely good Will Forte as his son David, an old fashioned ‘road movie’ that does much to captures the hardship faced those in the seemingly wilderness Mid-States of America and the void that comes between parent and child, both states of affairs are not just to be seen as a black and white issue.

Ian D. Hall