Verdict: Jack's back, and it could mean his fourth Oscar.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
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"About Schmidt" is all about Jack. As in Nicholson.

The three-time Oscar winner is trolling for No. 4 with his fearless and subtle portrayal of Warren Schmidt, a 66-year-old Midwesterner who's spent his entire life working in an Omaha insurance company. Note that I say life, not career. That's very much what this astute movie is all about — our hero is a crushingly ordinary man who, like Sinclair Lewis' George Babbitt, never paid much attention to what was going on outside his office. He's a kind of innocent — not abroad, but at home.

We meet Schmidt the day of his retirement. Sitting at his empty desk, with boxes neatly piled against the wall, he stolidly watches the clock as it tick-tocks to 5 o'clock for the last time in his working life. Next is a glum drive in the rain to the strip-mall steakhouse where his colleagues are giving him a party. Presented with a cake shaped like the insurance company's office building and toasted for doing his job, his eyes glaze over.

He's about to learn how much his life has been glazed over. Schmidt's apple-cheeked wife, Helen (June Squibb, who actually looks like someone married to a man in his 60s), has bought them a humongous 35-foot Winnebago so they can spend their twilight years (as they say) touring the country. She's so excited about the prospect, she's already making him eat breakfast in their home away from home.

Circumstances dictate otherwise, and Schmidt takes off on his own. He's headed to Denver, where he hopes to talk his mopey daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis), out of marrying Randall (Dermot Mulroney), a muttonhead with a mullet who thinks water beds are the wave of the future. Maybe that's because Randall's mother, Roberta (Kathy Bates), is an earth mother with a hot tub for two. (The tub figures in one of the movie's most talked-about scenes.)

However, the most "intimate" relationship in Schmidt's life is with someone we barely see. That's Ndugo, a 6-year-old Tanzanian orphan Schmidt impulsively signed up to sponsor for $22 a month. Encouraged by the charity to write to his charge, Schmidt composes hilariously morose and inappropriate letters (all beginning with the painfully cheerful salutation "Dear Ndugo," which Nicholson reads as if he's taking off down a ski slope) that are more suited to a therapy session. Nicholson reads these missives without irony, sentimentality or even a hint of a cocked eyebrow. One sentence wonders, "Who is this old woman lying next to me?"

That cocked-eyebrow persona we all know so well is crucial to Nicholson's success here. We keep waiting for that patented Nicholson explosion; when, where or if it may come is what gives the movie its multiple layers. When Schmidt escapes his retirement party and goes to the hotel bar for a drink, we see him at the hotel bar in "The Shining." When he orders a medium-size Blizzard at a Dairy Queen — with Reese's Pieces and cookie dough — we're struck by two things. One, how much we unconsciously brace for a tantrum, as in the famous diner scene in "Five Easy Pieces," and two, how heartbreakingly childlike it is for this lonely man to want Reese's Pieces and cookie dough in his ice cream. This is Christmas Future for a lot of baby boomers.

Writer-director Alexander Payne based his script on a loose mix of an unproduced screenplay of his own and Louis Begley's novel "About Schmidt." It's not as sharp as Payne's previous movies, "Citizen Ruth" and "Election"; the pacing can be slack and the tone uneven. (Broad comedy alternates with poignancy.) In an odd way, the film is like a Beckett play: everything is background for the person stage center, i.e., Nicholson, who gives a sensational, almost existential performance as he moves from one encounter to the next.

There's an autumnal cast to "About Schmidt," reflecting both its theme and Nicholson's long career. In "Death of a Salesman," Willy Loman's wife insists, "Attention must be paid." That's this movie's grace note. Attention will always be paid to Jack Nicholson, but here he's channeled his star power into a brilliant portrayal that insists attention must be paid to all the Schmidts of this world.