Schultze Gets the Blues - Palm Beach Post

'Schultze' gets no laughs

Quirky story too long, never gets funny

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

German filmmakers are hardly known for their senses of humor and writer-director Michael Schorr is no exception.

If his quirky, but glacially slow and deadpan Schultze Gets the Blues is in fact a comedy it is surely one of the driest ever encountered. I saw the film on a videocassette at home, where it elicited stony silence. It would be hard to fathom it drawing much laughter, even from a theater packed with moviegoers. It is not that Schultze Gets the Blues is uninteresting, just not particularly funny.

Paramount Classics

'Schultze Gets the Blues'

The verdict: An exceedingly dry, deadpan comedy about a German miner dealing with unexpected retirement.

Director: Michael Schorr
Starring: Horst Krause, Harald Warmbrunn, Karl Fred Muller, Ursula Schucht and Hannelore Schubert
Run time: 114 minutes
Release date: February 18, 2005
Rating: PG for language
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Burly, beer-bellied Schultze (Horst Krause, who may remind you of The Three Stooges' Curly) gets suddenly forced into retirement from his job as a salt miner. So he has to find something to do with himself, a search that seniors may well identify with.

Schultze and his miner buddies are ill-prepared for retirement. They are bid a fond farewell by their fellow workers with a dirge-like song, then try to fill their days drinking beer, fishing and playing cards and chess, the latter with little of the patience or decorum the game requires. Schultze also trudges to a nursing home to visit his ailing mother and spends a lot of time napping on his living room couch.

Schultze's main recreation is as an amateur accordionist, regularly regaling his music club members with his rendition of a rousing, tradition-bound polka. One day, however, he becomes enthralled with the rhythms of peppy Cajun zydeco music on the radio, and soon his fingers start flying across the keyboard to this new sound. If that were not life-changing enough, Schultze begins immersing himself in Cajun culture, whipping up a spicy jambalaya on his stove top.

Perhaps just to get rid of him for awhile, he is suddenly sent to America to represent his music club at a folk festival in Texas.

In its subject matter, but not its tone, Schultze Gets the Blues will probably bring to mind Jack Nicholson's portrait of uneasy retirement, About Schmidt. You can sense that writer Schorr chose to make Schultze a miner because of its dull, repetitive labor, the equivalent of the actuarial job that Schmidt devoted his life to at a Nebraska life insurance company. Both then set out on unexpected odysseys, encountering people completely outside their understanding, but reaching a measure of acceptance in the process.

In Texas, at his German town's sister city on the gulf, Schultze finds that his accordion playing is no match for the nimble fingers of down-home Cajuns. Yet he finds that he fits in well enough, despite an almost total lack of English skills. Yes, Schorr wants us to know with a sentimental insistence, people are people all over the globe.

Schorr looks at the United States with an outsider's awe, holding his camera on even the most mundane of landscapes with a deliberate — as in "slow-paced" — fascination.

The film runs nearly two hours and feels long, largely because of the leisurely editing. It is as if Schorr knew his movie wasn't going anyplace, so he is in no hurry to get there.