In this acerbic comedy about disappointment and failure, Jack Nicholson portrays Warren Schmidt, a man in the midst of a late-life crisis. The film opens with Warren’s retirement dinner and dramatically concludes with his daughter’s wedding to a waterbed salesman, a fellow the increasingly reflective father finds not "up to snuff." Between these events, Payne concocts a geriatric version of the road picture in which the aging protagonist travels from Omaha to Denver, revisiting old haunts and finding himself through the long letters he writes to a child in Tanzania he is sponsoring for seventy-three cents a day.