About Schmidt is, by all accounts, an excellent movie, and one which I didn’t very much care for. Put it down to a personal problem; perhaps Jack Nicholson’s character hits too close to home.

Warren Schmidt (Nicholson), who once had great ambitions, is now retiring as a (very superfluous) vice-president at Woodmen Insurance in Omaha. Retirement, too, isn’t going to be everything he intended it to be; he’s irritated with his wife Helen (though not particularly happy when she keels over dead quite early in the film), has not much of anything to do, and is extremely upset about the fact that his daughter — who is herself getting a bit long in the tooth — is about to marry a total doofus. Eventually, he sets out in the giant camper van that his wife made him buy and drives to Colorado to try to talk his daughter out of her marriage. En route he visits the place where he was born (the house has long since been razed to make way for a franchise tire store) and tries to put the make on the wife of a Good Sam who has befriended him. In Colorado he finds himself in the home of a batch of very unusual and disconcerting prospective in-laws, most notably mother Roberta (Kathy Bates) who has worked her way through two husbands, is in the market for a third, and doesn’t hesitate to get naked (on camera) into a hot tub with Warren, despite all the signs of advanced middle age — a sight apparently frightening enough to scare Warren out of the tub and back into his camper.

I really can’t say why I didn’t like this. All the actors put in good performances, and the story is not (I fear) unrealistic. Perhaps, again, it was just too good for me.