It looks like I introduced Schmidt as a character back in 2015 in this post here, but I never expected him to show up often. He and I were friends back in college, of course, but even at the time that was something like 35 years in the past. Now it's 45. And my contact with Schmidt over the years had been so sporadic that I never expected to have to cast him as a movie character.
Plans change. By the time this series is done, half of my posts tagged "Schmidt" will be dated in this month. So maybe it's time to give the man and his mother each a face.
Not that it matters, I suppose, but I really didn’t have to think hard about it. At some level, I think I’ve always had more or less the same actor in mind, to cast as Schmidt. Ma Schmidt wasn’t a lot harder—though in her case I can think of the actress but I can’t quite remember which part I’ve seen her in that reminds me so forcibly of the woman I’m staying with right now.
With that said, here are Schmidt and his mother.
Schmidt: James Dean
In personality, Schmidt and Jett could not be further apart. Schmidt is educated and soft-spoken. He is, as I have said, introverted and unobtrusive. I'm trying to remember if any of us could see Jett's kind of suppressed, volcanic energy in Schmidt back when he was a young man. I think so. Most of the time he was silent and sullen. Then he'd get drunk—not often, but he could drink more at a sitting than anyone else in the dorm—and he'd become friendly and voluble. It was the only time anyone saw him smile.
As life went on, though, Schmidt sublimated all that power and energy into his work and his responsibilities. Part of Jett's smoldering energy came from his lifelong, unacknowledged lust for Leslie Benedict. I don't know if Schmidt ever longed for someone unobtainable in the same way—he is very tight-lipped about his private life. But I can't rule it out.
(All I can say is that if something like that ever happened, it would be ironic. I still remember a paper he wrote back in college arguing that the protagonist of The Sorrows of Young Werther should have just fallen in love with someone more accessible, instead of ruining his own life and blighting the lives of his friends. But then, Schmidt never took his own life; and if he ever suffered romantic pangs, he never troubled his friends with them.)
Ma Schmidt: Laura Dern
Partly there's a physical resemblance, except that Ma Schmidt is more than 30 years older than Laura Dern. And partly, I'm sure I've seen a movie in which Laura Dern played a character a lot like Ma Schmidt. I just can't remember which one.
Ma Schmidt is the sweetest person. She's friendly and affable and gracious. Schmidt used to claim that she had to be a saint, because she put up with his father (Pa Schmidt) who could be a cantankerous SOB. (Actually Schmidt has more than once compared his father to Benvenuto Cellini—he specifically referenced the drinking, the quarreling, the fighting, the whoring, the hard living, the braggadocio, … and oh yes, … by the way … the artistic brilliance and dedicated craft.)
But Ma Schmidt has always been kind of ditzy too, given to saying things that just seemed odd and off the wall. Schmidt and his father would roll their eyes at these remarks, and never took them too seriously. Now, of course, her conversation has gotten a lot worse because her memory is gone. But Schmidt assures me that even in her prime, some of her remarks were pretty goofy.
She also sketched. I believe she painted. Her husband did the bulk of the paying art, but she did some art of her own—even if it was for her own enjoyment, or just to hang in the house.
Maybe I'll think of more to say later.
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