Nicholson returns, now as a bland everyman in About Schmidt

And therein lies one of this year’s more interesting Oscar tales.

Director Alexander Payne told Nicholson to play ‘‘a smallman’’ and the actor said he followed orders, fashioning a buttoned-down everyman on the lines of George F. Babbit with touches of Homer Simpson rather than one of his more famous creations like the Joker in ‘‘Batman’’ or the deranged caretaker shouting ‘‘Heeere’s Johnny’’ in The Shining.

The result is About Schmidt, which opens this week and which, according to virtually every critic, will easily earn Nicholson his 12th Oscar nomination if not his fourth Academy Award.

The trade newspaper Hollywood Reporter said all that is certain about the battle for the best actor award is that Nicholson, 65, will win one of the five nominations. Everything else is up for grabs.

But Warren Schmidt is about as ‘‘unJack’’ a character as you can find. He is so emotionally repressed that he barely seems to breathe in About Schmidt.

Schmidt is a man losing all that holds his life together: He retires from the insurance company he loyally served only to see the boxes of his records thrown in the garbage. His wife dies suddenly and he discovers that he has no connections with anyone save a six-year-old Tanzanian boy named Ndugo whom he supports through the ‘‘Child Reach’’ programme but whom he has never seen.

His letters to Ndugo bare his tortured soul as he travels in a motor home to his estranged daughter’s wedding to a waterbed salesman, not long after he discovered that his late wife had an affair with his best friend.

All this may sound extremely painful but as director Payne told a group of reporters recently, he wanted to do a film about a man in his 60s, who realises his life is meaningless and who loses everything — and do it as a comedy.

Payne succeeded thanks to the restraint shown by an actor renowned, even beloved, for his volcanic on-screen eruptions — an ability to go so far over the top that when his ‘‘Joker’’ character died in the movie Batman, whole audiences simply packed up and went home, thinking that the film was over and there was nothing left to see.

‘‘We expect from Jack Nicholson that at some point he will explode in a huge emotional outburst in About Schmidt. He is always on the brink of that but it never happens. His is a beautifully disciplined and controlled performance,’’ says Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel.

And that, says Nicholson, is just what he tried to do. In a news conference to promote the film, the actor said that just because everyone was kind enough to say he was great, it didn’t mean that things came easily and that he didn’t have problems getting his work done.

‘‘Almost anyone can give a good performance when you are unknown. The real problem of acting is to do it after you are known, or in my case ‘unJack’ the character to get the audience to reinvest in a new and specific fictional person. In the early and middle part of the film, the director feared ‘Jackisms’ but it was an unnecessary fear,’’ he added.

But Nicholson also said that while he did all he could to make Schmidt a person different

from himself, he could identify with the character. ‘‘I looked at him as the man I might have became if I didn’t wind up in show business … I don’t have trouble identifying with people.’’ (Reuters)