While the film has generally received anywhere from positive to rave reviews, I am decidedly in the opposite camp. It would appear that Payne was attempting to create some sort of dark comedy, but in my opinion the result turned out to be simply a tedious cartoon. All of the characters with perhaps the exception of the son Dave played by Will Forte, seemed very two dimensional with little, if any, depth unfolded or transformation effected by the conclusion of the film. The character of Woody Grant never moved beyond a sad and pathetic 75 year old man with a brain addled by a long history of alcoholism and cursed with the onset of Alzheimer's. Payne painted this in broad brush strokes with the character mostly gazing off into space, saying "Huh" when spoken to, and daydreaming with his mouth open. His wife Kate was something out of an Al Capp comic strip, a sort of overdrawn termagant wife played by June Squibb who usually yelled her lines to the camera, sort of like Olive Oyl as the ultimate bitch. The minor roles of the aging townspeople in the fictional town of Hawthorne, NE where Woody and his family visit en route from Billings, MT to Lincoln, NE in his quest to collect a $Million in a scam magazine sweepstakes, were equally as shallow and simply included, in what seemed to be a cynical stereotypical portrait of a small town in Nebraska, a collection of quasi Grant Wood American Gothic zombies, who do nothing but drink at the local pub and watch football on television. Local Nebraskans will tell you that older people in these communities are far more in touch with the world, and not living any kind of isolated life that may have existed 60 years or so ago or the bleak kind of picture of the past which Payne seemed to be trying to paint.
I might subtitle the film as Nebraska: A Road Trip in Circles. From what I could gather, the storyline was supposedly intended to trace the process of family bonding (primarily that of son Dave and father Woody) through a bittersweet road trip revisiting family and friends along the way. Usually road trip movies offer some degree of character transformation by the conclusion. Here there seemed little if any change. Woody was still living his life in a hazy daze though now possessing a new truck and generator purchased for him by his son when they arrived in Lincoln and discovered there was no prize money. While his wife Kate exhibited one fleeting moment of tenderness toward Woody near the end of the film in a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, there was nothing to suggest that there would be any difference in their ensuing lives together. Perhaps the son Dave may have felt a bit closer to his father after the trip, but heading back to Billings, there seemed little sense of that. Again, I have no idea of what exactly Payne was attempting to accomplish with this film. It was anything but comedic or tragic or any kind of subtle ambiguous satiric mixture of the two. There was, however, some wonderful shots of rural landscapes, but unfortunately, the fine cinematography didn't prove quite enough to redeem the film overall.
I might subtitle the film as Nebraska: A Road Trip in Circles. From what I could gather, the storyline was supposedly intended to trace the process of family bonding (primarily that of son Dave and father Woody) through a bittersweet road trip revisiting family and friends along the way. Usually road trip movies offer some degree of character transformation by the conclusion. Here there seemed little if any change. Woody was still living his life in a hazy daze though now possessing a new truck and generator purchased for him by his son when they arrived in Lincoln and discovered there was no prize money. While his wife Kate exhibited one fleeting moment of tenderness toward Woody near the end of the film in a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, there was nothing to suggest that there would be any difference in their ensuing lives together. Perhaps the son Dave may have felt a bit closer to his father after the trip, but heading back to Billings, there seemed little sense of that. Again, I have no idea of what exactly Payne was attempting to accomplish with this film. It was anything but comedic or tragic or any kind of subtle ambiguous satiric mixture of the two. There was, however, some wonderful shots of rural landscapes, but unfortunately, the fine cinematography didn't prove quite enough to redeem the film overall.