Next up on the Letterboxd Challenge is a previously unseen black and white movie from the last ten years. This is one where “previously unseen” does filter out most of the obvious choices for me, so we ended up here.

So the premise of this movie is that an elderly man gets a “you’ve already won $1 million” sweepstakes letter, believes it deeply, and wants to head off to Lincoln, Nebraska (from Billings, MT where he lives) to collect his winnings. Like, really wants to, to the point that he starts walking multiple times when nobody will drive him. And finally one of his sons is like, fuck it, I’ve got nothing going on (he works at a home theater store, and his girlfriend of several years just moved out), let’s go.

So, I thought this was going to be a super-sad movie (and was afraid it was somehow going to be mawkishly inspirational), but it turns out to be just an absolutely piercingly incisive movie about family, maybe the best I’ve seen since Tokyo Story. There’s the relationship between the old man and his wife, which gets multiple layers added to it over the course of the movie; there’s an extended family that they stop in to visit for a while, with some painfully awkward conversations of the type you get from people who’ve known each other forever but haven’t spoken in years; there’s the relationship between the old man and his son (and the other son, and their mom). And it’s all done just so well, really understanding the ways that family can be annoying or shitty or even just irrelevant, while simultaneously being this bedrock fact about the world, a web of obligations and simmering tensions understood only implicitly — and the ways that families have their own secret histories, how each generation only understands the previous one dimly and inaccurately.

The movie isn’t just about families, it’s also about small towns (which are nearly a form of family in their own right), about aging, about what it means to live a good life, about the road (with some stunning Great Plains landscapes), and yeah, even a little bit about how shitty scams are.

I didn’t really have many expectations about this movie going in, but was blown away — it’s funny, sweet, poignant, a little sad, and always true-to-life. I seem to remember this getting some acclaim at the time, but it seems to have been largely forgotten, which is a shame, because it’s great. Highly recommended.