Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir:
While watching Dern’s performance a second time through, I couldn’t help recalling William Butler Yeats’ famous lines about an old man’s heart: “sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/ It knows not what it is.” There’s nothing like seeing a familiar figure do something entirely new, and at no point in Dern’s long career of playing crime-movie bad guys and (as he puts it) “fifth cowboy on the left” has there been anything remotely like this. There’s a blankness to Woody, as well as a hunger and a ferocity, that feels terrifyingly real. We can’t tell what he’s really thinking when David tells him, over and over again, that the million-dollar letter is a come-on for magazine subscriptions and that he hasn’t won anything. Sometimes Woody gives back an implacable hostility and sometimes he’s like a petulant child: “But it says I won!” When he claims not to remember an old girlfriend from Hawthorne, or never to have considered the question of whether he was in love with Kate (the marvelous June Squibb), David’s irascible and foulmouthed mother, we can’t be sure whether he’s lying to David or to himself.
Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern:
Bruce Dern’s portrait of the boozy old coot is a wonder, as well as the capstone, thus far, of that singular actor’s career. With a white nimbus of unkempt hair and a wild look in his gimlet eyes, Woody walks stiffly, like a puppet with splintering legs attached to strings of unequal length, but he walks often and far. Instead of a wanderlust, he has a wander-off-lust that keeps his wife, Kate (June Squibb), in a state of agitation, and keeps their 40-something son, David, busy looking for him. (David is played, with soulful delicacy, by Will Forte.)
Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan:
None of this would have been possible, obviously, without Dern’s meticulous work as the battered and baffled Woody. Restraint has not always been a hallmark of Dern’s previous efforts, but he is in impressive control here with acting that does as much with looks and body language as it does with words. His character reminds us, as does the entire film, how little it takes to make us happy and how hard it is to get even that.
New York Times’ AO Scott:
Woody is another matter altogether, and Mr. Dern turns this inarticulate, alcoholic lump of humanity — too passive to be a monster, too distracted to be charming — into a great screen character. He is far from heroic, or even noble, but Woody’s stubbornness, and the waves of unacknowledged feeling that emanate from his grizzled, shapeless face and unsteady, bulky frame, make him worth caring about. Not that it’s easy for anyone.
