Worst to Best: The films of Alexander Payne

With 'The Holdovers' making a host of Top 10 lists, it's a good time to look back on the career of Middle America's premier cinematic voice.

The poet of flyover country, director Alexander Payne has only made seven films since debuting with Citizen Ruth in 1996, but each of them has felt like a small event, graced by the consistency of his character-based humor and his devotion to the way ordinary people, Nebraskans especially, manage lives of nagging banality and heartbreak. As the years have passed, Payne has seemed more and more like a man out of time, turning out comedies of immense appeal at a time when such low-key fare is relegated to the arthouse. A healthy Hollywood ecosystem would employ multiple Alexander Payne types, but instead we just have the one. Fortunately, as the list below suggests, he fills that niche extremely well.  

8. Downsizing (2017) 

In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott likened Payne’s unusual high-concept comedy to “an episode of The Twilight Zone directed by Preston Sturges,” which frankly sounds wonderful—and is, to a point. Payne and his frequent co-writer, Jim Taylor, hadn’t attempted an out-and-out satire since starting his career with the one-two of Citizen Ruth and Election, but Downsizing only half-commits to its juicy premise before permanently drifting off on a tangent. Matt Damon takes his inevitable turn as one of Payne’s Midwestern lumps, a cash-strapped Omaha resident who agrees to a permanent medical procedure to shrink to five inches tall and move to the utopian tiny-person community of Leisureland, New Mexico. One immediate problem: his wife (Kristen Wiig) backs out at the last minute. In the film’s sharpest momentsPayne and Taylor chip away at the fallibility of humankind, which inevitably taints an experiment designed to help the environment and increase prosperity. But as its hero gets more involved with a Vietnamese dissident (Hong Chau) living on the fringes of Leisureland, the film loses sight of the bigger (or, in this case, smaller) picture. 

7. The Descendants (2011) 

The greatest feature of most Payne comedies is the lived-in quality of their settings, which in his Nebraska films often combine a banal familiarity with authentic warmth, like immersing yourself in a wood-paneled family room. That’s without question the standout quality of The Descendants, which takes place in Hawaii, but is determined to show paradise as it’s experienced by the people who actually live there, rather than the tourists and honeymooners lining the coast. Payne also gets a fine performance out of George Clooney as a Honolulu lawyer and absentee father whose life is turned upside down by an accident that leaves his wife in an irreversible coma. His attempts to wrangle two daughters—the oldest played by Shailene Woodley in a career-making turn—is complicated by news of his wife’s infidelity and pressure from his extended family to sell 25,000 acres of pristine land in Kauai that’s been entrusted to him. The Descendants is a lovely, textured, fitfully hilarious film, but it faces the Downsizing problem of trying to fuse screwball mania with the untidiness of a character piece. 

6. Nebraska (2013) 

Now we get to the good stuff. Nebraska was #8 on my best-of list for 2013 and yet here it sits on the back half of Payne’s overall filmography, a testament to the consistency of his strongest work. Shooting in a black-and-white that channels the austerity of the Midwestern landscape and the starkness of its characters’ emotions, Payne gives Bruce Dern a late-career showcase as Woody, a cranky, demented Montanan who ropes his son (Will Forte) into taking him to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect on a million-dollar sweepstakes scam. But the heart of the film is an extended pit stop in the dead-end town where Woody and his battle-axe of a wife (June Squibb) grew up. A scene in the town graveyard where Woody’s son gets a sense of all the family and friends that have preceded his father in death is bittersweet perfection, its sadness undercut by hilariously filthy gossip.