About Schmidt: A bleak vision of Retirement
Further to the last entry on diverging visions of the boomers’ collective future, I was reminded of one rather bleak view of retirement in a movie I’d watched some years ago: the Jack Nicholson movie, About Schmidt.
Originally released in 2002, I had watched it on DVD a year later and recalled little except the fact I had enjoyed it. Over the weekend, I came across it again, buying a used copy from a local video store that is going out of business following the entry of a Blockbuster.
I’d suggest anyone with an overly rosy view of retirement watch this movie.
For those who haven’t, or have forgotten it, Nicholson plays a Nebraskan in his mid 60s, Warren Schmidt, who is forced to retire from his job as an actuary at an insurance company. Money is not the problem here; it appears he has a nice pension and likely worked there most of his life, perhaps as long as he remained married to his wife Helen: 42 years.
Within weeks of his retirement, she unexpectedly dies, but he nevertheless proceeds with the dream of touring North America in a luxurious giant Winnebago motor home. His only daughter is about to marry a loser who sells waterbeds and falls for pyramid selling schemes. But now Schmidt finally has time for his daughter, she no longer cares.
You can read the entire plot summary here at Wikipedia and an interview with Nicholson himself about the extent to which he related to the part here.
The Special Features section of the DVD contains some deleted scenes, including a parody of the famous Nicholson scene in Five Easy Pieces, where he instructs a waitress how to get around some ridiculous constraints on ordering a chicken salad sandwich. But in the deleted Schmidt version of the scene, consistent with his defeated character, Nicholson backs down and accepts the sandwich as offered.
However, I digress. I’m not normally given to reviewing six-year-old movies but Retirement is one of the ongoing themes of this blog. I must have been thinking about the movie on Sunday morning when I was chatting after church to a fellow parishioner, now in his mid 60s, who retired at 52, as did his wife. Both had worked most of their careers at single firms and enjoyed the traditional Defined Benefit pension plan, as well as some Early Retirement incentives. Like other retirees I have chatted with, they claim to be "busier than ever" and "don't know how they ever found time for work." In this particular case, the couple does not indulge in either of the two activities often associated with retirement: golf or bridge. The focus seems to revolve around children and grandchildren, the church and volunteering.
For Schmidt, salvation comes in a somewhat similar fashion. While watching television early in his retirement, he responds to a pitch to support a Tanzanian foster child. This provides a convenient structure for the film, since much of the audio is voice-over with Nicholson reciting passages of his frequent letters to the child, named Ndugu. That he relates more to his foster child than his own biological daughter is one of the many ironies in the film. I say salvation but the way the movie ends — I won't spoil it — it's hard to say what lies further down the retirement road for Schmidt.
As for those of us still in the working world, the film underlines a critical point: that retirement is not a finishing line but a starting point for a major new phase of life. It's as important to plan how you will spend all that time — and with whom — as it is accumulating the necessary financial resources to embark upon this perhaps final chapter of life.
With today's extended life expectancy — and remember Schmidt should have been well aware of this, being an actuary — it's entirely possible that retirement may last as long as our working years. Think about how many hours you've already spent in the work place and ask yourself whether you want to spend an equal amount of time watching TV. I always remember the quip by computer consultant Art Benjamin that "most jobs are marginally better than day-time television."
About Schmidt also shows how traumatic it can be going from a full-time job to a classical "full-stop" retirement. You have to think Nicholson/Schmidt might have been better prepared for it had he gone the "Phased Retirement" route.
For more on that see last week's video interviews between myself and William Hanley [segments entitled About Retirement and Freedom 55]. Freedom 55 is also the focus of the video interview with financial planner Warren Baldwin, which went up today (Monday).
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