Poor Warren Schmidt. He's a victim of modern-day Americana -- you know, that strange culture which sprang up in this country as a result of having too many small, isolated towns sprawled about the land, linked only by interstates, with television as the primary means of information and entertainment. Americana produced mom-and-pop stores, mini-malls, brand names, franchising, rooting for the home team, and rather unimaginative cuisine (like beef stew -- is that a dish?). It feeds the American dream to its young, then processes the college-degree holders in corporations until they're working only for the promise of pension and retirement. And once they get there, what happens next?

In About Schmidt, Mr. Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) finds out the hard way what the sad by-product of Americana is -- emptiness. Nothing fulfilling awaits him in his freshly-attained retirement from an insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska. His daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) lives in Denver, and his wife has been programmed throughout the years to be an efficient household drone. In the midst of his loneliness, he decides to drive his mobile home to Jeannie's residence, planning to arrive early for her impending wedding. Along the way, he detours through the small towns of the midwest to do a little soul-searching.

This is a bleak little tale, really. It plays out like a bittersweet comedy -- viewers laugh at Schmidt's situation, but the laughs come with a good dose of pity directed both at Schmidt and the state of the American "boondocks" landscape. In the way About Schmidt exposes cultural stagnation and human isolation outside major metropolis zones, it almost feels like the counter-version of several of this year's earlier movies. Where Y Tu Mamá También revealed the hidden cultural riches of Mexico, About Schmidt shows the impersonal nothingness found just off U.S. highways. Where Monsoon Wedding and My Big Fat Greek Wedding depicted the warmth and energy of traditionally large and extended Indian and Greek families, About Schmidt displays the coldness and resentment residing in America's broken households, where each nuclear family survives in its own pod until it gets old and quietly crumbles. Finally, About Schmidt emphasizes these contrasts by ending with one of the more relatively joyless weddings of recent memory.

Director Alexander Payne (Election) takes his time shooting  the bland landscape Schmidt travels through, allowing the images to linger in our minds. We see nondescript roads pocketed with the occasional shopping center, with a Dairy Queen here, or a Tony Roma's there. Isolated gas stations and trailer parks evoke no idyll. When Schmidt goes into tourist mode, he visits little museums which display tiny collections or construct automated dioramas as pitiable attempts to celebrate the dusty past. Funny and yet depressing, Schmidt's bemused observations of his world made me laugh, but the exposure of that world's lack of warmth made me want to cry.

At the heart of all this is Nicholson and his dead-on performance as a 66-year-old man looking for any kind of meaning after he has lived out the useful part of his life. Facing the prospect of dying with nothing to show for it, Schmidt is so lonely he mistakes an honest-to-goodness human connection as an invitation to intimacy. When he finds himself in the company of his future son-in-law's relatives, like his mother (Kathy Bates), Schmidt is contemptuous of them -- he views them as weird, deluded, and oblivious of their ultimate paths to total insignificance. He's furious that his daughter is about to marry into this situation. Yet, what can he do? What's out there that's better? How would he know, since he himself has never found it?

About Schmidt has a humorous sub-plot that ultimately provides a glimpse of hope. It may communicate different messages to different people, but for me it implied looking for answers outside environmental limitations. Life need not be confined to suburban microcosms. Unfortunate schlubs like Schmidt could do well to broaden their scope -- look outside of the job, outside of the towns, past the highways. Look beyond Americana.

(Released by New Line Cinema and rated "R" for language and brief nudity.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.