There's nothing worse than a bad ending, except a bad ending that is calculated to erase the rest of the film it's tacked onto. In two highly acclaimed (why, I can't imagine) movies of this holiday season, this one and Adaptation, terrible and calculated endings drag behind, frantically erasing the tracks laid down in the previous 90 or so minutes, like bandits attempting to erase their trail with the help of tree branches. In Adaptation, the ending scuttled an otherwise good, even great movie; here, it is a bald and obvious attempt to graft some sympathy and pathos onto a heartless, cruel, and sadly recycled movie. Critics are raving about the subtle blend of satire and caring; I wonder if they saw the same movie? This movie is two hours of Alexander Payne encouraging the audience to congratulate themselves on how smart they are.

Jack Nicholson, earning rave reviews from just about everybody, plays Warren Schmidt, a recently retired insurance actuary. He is 60-something, running down, absolutely boring. His wife of 30-something years, Helen (June Squibb), is around just long enough for us to learn that Warren is annoyed by everything about her: she smells funny, she's old and wrinkled, she says things like "don't dilly-dally" when he goes out for the afternoon. She quickly keels over, and after discovering a deep secret she had hidden from him (and running out of clean dishes), he decides to head off across the Midwest (he's in Omaha) to show up early for his daughter Jeannie's (Hope Davis) wedding to a mullet-headed waterbed salesman (Dermot Mulroney) who wants to get Warren in on a pyramid scheme. The film becomes a road movie when Jeannie violently opposes the idea of him showing up early, and he decides to spend the in-between time driving his gargantuan RV across the plains, meeting interesting people and seeing the sights, until just before the wedding. When he shows up, he finds redneck middle-American chaos that includes, but is certainly not limited to, his daughter's future mother-in-law Roberta (Kathy Bates) coming on to him in the hot tub behind her house.

Along the way, we get a narration of sorts as Warren writes letters to Ndugu, the African boy he has adopted through some television service. In the letters, he whines about his life, his wife, his future in-laws, all things that would be meaningless to Ndugu; indeed, this is a running gag throughout the film, one that is funny the first time Nicholson sneers "Dear Ndugu," but that stops being funny long before the filmmakers think it does.

So, where to start. I like Alexander Payne, the writer/director whose previous film was the scathingly funny Election. Well, I guess I liked that movie, but I don't think I like Payne. Election was bitterly mean-spirited and harsh in its depiction of the war of wills between an overachieving high school student and her teacher. It was mean, nasty, and it hit below the belt. It worked, however, because when we were laughing at the buffoons onscreen, we were also invited, or forced, to laugh at ourselves, because in every character in the film, we could see either ourselves or someone we knew in high school. This film, unfortunately, is an invitation by Payne and company to get together in liberal intellectual circles and laugh at people they don't know or care to know.

Payne is from the Midwest; he grew up in Omaha. It is obvious from this film that he bears great hatred for his place of birth and the people who inhabit it. Every speaking part in the film is a cartoonish caricature of a type, a convention with a big target painted on for the near-sighted and un-hip. Caricatures are good sometimes; however, these are tired, worn-out ones, cardboard cutouts aged and starting to peel. The mullet-headed salesman? The glad-handing campground alcoholics struck dizzy by the sight of Schmidt's huge RV? The off-key best friend singing Dan Fogelberg at the wedding, and the self-penned vows ("when I say I really love you, I mean really. And when I say really, I mean really really"). Come on, Alexander, show us something we haven't been laughing at for twenty years.

Think I'm overstating my case? Take Dermot Mulroney, who plays the aforementioned mullet-headed salesman. In one of the best films released this year, Nicole Holofcener's Lovely & Amazing, he plays a self-obsessed actor, a caricature that we can see a mile away. However, in that film, he is allowed to be a person too: the scene where he is asked to critique Emily Mortimer's body lets him show a range of feeling that reveals the humanity in him. He's still the self-obsessed actor, but that's not the entire definition of his character. Here, though, he never changes, never shows any sign of being a living, breathing person.

Payne's scorn for his characters drips from the screen; at no point is it more odious than Kathy Bates' attempted seduction of Nicholson. Bates's incredibly brave performance (she is one of the few actors in the film who manage to rise above the material) includes her disrobing and climbing into a hot tub. This is played for a cheap laugh: we are supposed to laugh with revulsion at Bates' 54-year-old body, but I could only cringe at Payne's cheapest shot, which wasted Bates's classy moment.

If Payne's movie is a massive in-joke, Jack Nicholson's performance is the crowning touch. Critics are raving about how restrained and human he is, but I just don't understand. He's not tearing at the wallpaper and howling at the moon, but maybe this is worse than the mugging he is known for. Because Jack's in on the joke, winking at the audience throughout the film: hey, it's really me, "Here's Johnny!", etc. He's mostly quiet, but those mad eyebrows, the sneering smile, the clown faces he is so known for, they're all there, right below the surface, fighting to get out. Even the casting is part of the joke: we get to laugh at poor old Warren Schmidt, the aging schlub, the utter bore, married to someone's grandmother and hit on by his future son-in-law's doughy mother, because we know it's not true. We know Jack's really Jack, dating the underfed Lara Flynn Boyle and schmoozing with other super-celebrities. He's impersonating a middle-American bore, not acting.

And then, as the crowning touch, as if he suddenly realized that the audience would go away feeling somewhat dirty for eating what he gave them to eat, Payne gets out his magic markers and tries to elicit some kind of sympathy for Schmidt, some kind of message for the audience to take away like a door prize for being in on the joke. I won't go into it out of respect for readers who hate spoilers (although getting uptight about plot points in a film like this is a little, well, uptight), but it is a moment of such horrid, rank sentimentality that it wouldn't have been out of place in a Hallmark commercial. Maybe this explains why this film has been nominated for Golden Globes as a drama and not a comedy. It's disgusting, a breath mint for an audience that has been eating garbage for almost two hours, and I can't believe that so many critics are falling for it.