“Nebraska” (2013): a Great Movie to Pause and Look Back on Your Life. Film Review.

Nebraska (2013) is a tragicomic black-and-white roadmovie about the intergenerational relationships of one family, full of reflections on life and unfulfilled hopes. It’s a very touching movie. Not enough to bring a tear to your eye, but enough to make you think about it.

Our parents are usually perceived by us children for a long time in a seemingly singular role — parental, in one dimension, and beyond that dimension their lives are shrouded in mystery. Who were these people before we were born? What do they do in their spare time? What do they believe and what do they fear?

But one day, instead of dismissing these questions once again (and sometimes against our will), we open the veil of this mystery: we dive into their world, see with our own eyes what they saw and meet for the first time people they have known for years. And then the usual image of a parent collapses, and instead of him before us there is a stranger, whose existence we did not even suspect, although we have lived with him all his life. Not everyone, I think, can survive this. Especially if the parents are as taciturn as Woody. But I think it’s a valuable experience.

By the way, the more I come across the roadmovie genre, the more I like it. When you’re on the road, it’s like time stops because you’re not at point B, but you’re not at point A. So in “Nebraska” the plot echoes the genre: Old Woody finds himself somewhere out of time, when the past is gone and the end has not yet come.

And the genre also makes it very clear: people are the same everywhere. If I, for example, am used to the special love of Russian directors to poke the viewer’s face into the unsightly aspects of life and have already learned the emotion that they generate, then in “Nebraska” to my surprise I felt something similar in the scenes about the lives of ordinary people. In provincial, stuck in the past cities of the United States people are exactly the same: drinking, chained to the TV, without aspirations and ambitions, in general, with the same weaknesses that Russian directors like to emphasize so much.

So for “Nebraska” I recommend to allocate an evening, when you catch a slight sadness and a romantic desire to go to the USA to peek at the life of other (but discouragingly the same as you) people.