Alexander Payne's late-life-crisis comedy about a retired Omaha insurance executive who now begins to wonder what it was all about. Jack Nicholson may be too big a star, or too hip a one, in relation to his surrounding cast (chosen with care down to the smallest role), but you cannot fault his effort: his frog-on-a-lily-pad lethargy, his flat-footed waddle, his comb-over, his open embrace of humiliation, in total harmony with the understated grotesquerie around him. Much of the fun of the movie, much of the comic cushion against the harshness of its vision, is in seeing King Jack demean himself. Payne, a perfectly named if not perfectly spelled filmmaker, evinces a fine eye for the topographical and architectural barrenness of America's Heartland (what someone might see as a "visual correlative" of the hero's spiritual state), and a fine ear, as well, for the cliché, the jocularities, the pieties, the mendacities of social lubrication. The opening retirement party ("Nice event"), the invited but unwanted visit to the office of the hero's yuppie successor at Woodmen of the World Insurance, the funeral reception, the nautically minded tourist from Eau Claire ("Ahoy!"), and the climactic wedding bash are all on a par with the wickedest tortures devised by Ring Lardner or Sinclair Lewis. Some scenes, it's true, go too far; and the voice-over device whereby the hero pours out his heart in letters to his six-year-old Tanzanian foster child ("For years now she has insisted that I sit when I urinate") is as facile and as far-fetched as it is funny. To be more precise: very, very. (The spoken name alone -- Ndugu -- is a push-button for laughs, no matter how many times it is activated.) The ending could arguably have been cut shorter for ambiguity, but while the teardrop and the smile might make things easier for seekers after a Bright Side, these emotional cues do not really clear up the ambiguity. With Dermot Mulroney, Hope Davis, Kathy Bates. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd