The one-word geographical title, a reference to the Midwest, may remind you of Fargo, which Nebraska resembles also in its depiction of stolid, unintentionally hilarious denizens of that mythic area known quadrennially as The Heartland. Where is it? In this movie, it goes from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, by way of Wyoming and South Dakota, with the action occurring mainly at a stopover at a small, fictitious Nebraska town called Hawthorne.
On the evidence of the film, red-state America isn't looking very good. The vistas are like the sea, the towns beat up and dilapidated, and the people like gargoyles with double-digit IQs. I say "like gargoyles," thereby suggesting a certain implausibility--a fair criticism, I think, though it's true that I remember as a boy hearing my older cousins' boyfriends brag about having driven from this town to that one in an impossibly short period of time.
The characters in the film would fall for the plot but I'm not sure the rest of us should. It involves an old alcoholic, played by Bruce Dern, who's determined to get to Lincoln to trade in a coupon for a million-dollar sweepstakes prize. He becomes a local celebrity when the four-state odyssey lands in his hometown ("Hawthorne"), where the celebration of his good fortune trudges obliviously past his sons' reports that their confused old man hasn't won anything so that it can be spoiled instead by the local dullards' slowly developing schemes for extorting a piece of the prize for themselves.
But the thin plot seems mostly a pretext for the road trip and a chance for the camera to dwell on the open, empty land and the signs in the ravaged towns, their expressions of distress accented by missing letters and broken lights. Shot in black and white, directed by Alexander Payne (Election, About Schmidt, Sideways), and starring, besides Dern, June Squibb as the old man's sharp-tongued wife and SNL's Will Forte as their earnest, down-on-his-luck son.
