I saw About Schmidt on a Saturday night in a theater full of young people out for a weekend of fun. It was instructive to watch how absorbed the entire theater became by this unlikely road movie about a 66-year-old retiree.

Just before the film began, there was a trailer for Anger Management with Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler. The trailer featured the flamboyant Jack Nicholson we all know and look out for. Interestingly, that Nicholson is as far from Warren Schmidt as it is humanly possible to get.

With an expanding release and still showing to full houses in its fifth week, the buzz about About Schmidt is that it will get Nicholson his 14th Academy Award nomination. Nicholson told reporters at the New York Film Festival that Schmidt was his most ‘unselfish' role -- an astute, self-aware assessment.

In a long career marked by unlikely reversals, Nicholson has become known as an actor's actor. His roles in landmark movies such as Chinatown, Easy Rider, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and the first Batman redefined Hollywood's notion of the leading man. Add About Schmidt to that list.

Gone is the goateed, wild man in the Wayfarers whose larger than life persona precedes him everywhere. Instead, we see a fat and balding old man who has come to the overwhelming realisation that his life does not amount to much.

The film begins with Schmidt, a reluctant guest at his retirement party. He is on his way out of a lifelong job as an insurance actuary. The man deputed to take his place is younger and more outgoing. And, as Schmidt will soon discover, the younger man has little use for his way of doing things.

It is all so depressing that Schmidt ducks out of his own party, looking for relief at the bar next door where he toasts himself with a solitary gimlet. A little later, he returns from posting a letter to find his wife of 44 years dead of a blood clot in the brain.

Wifeless and jobless, Schmidt decides to take off for Denver where his only daughter lives, with the idea of dissuading her from marrying the man she has chosen, a ponytailed waterbed salesman who "is not up to snuff" according to Warren. He drives there in the trailer he and his wife had planned to see the country in.

So begins the most unlikely road movie you will see this year. Nicholson is such a fine actor that he carries the movies single-handedly with some excellent supporting work from the redoubtable Kathy Bates. As a free-thinking earth mother, Kates is absolutely authentic. She even manages a nude scene that had some people in the audience protesting aloud.

There are some standout scenes. In one, Nicholson rebels against a life of regimentation by standing up to urinate (his wife has insisted he sit). Not only does he stand, he even twirls in place wetting the entire bathroom his hands raised in triumph. You can almost hear his character say, "Look Helen, no hands!"

Nicholson could easily have played that scene in his wild man persona. Instead he plays it with an understatement that is more effective than anything else. In another crucial scene, Schmidt asks forgiveness from, and forgives, his dead wife. He understands that he had been a disappointment to her. He asks the heavens for a sign and a star shoots through the sky. Nicholson's face at that moment is an achievement.