10 Best Booze-Guzzling Movie Characters

One of the great modern road trip movies, Nebraska follows Woody Grant, a delusional, ‘wet-brain’ alcoholic, who is convinced he’s won the lottery. All he has to do is travel to Nebraska to claim his prize. Woody doesn’t have a car so he’s intent on walking all the way to Nebraska (he currently lives in Montana). The police pick him up and drive him home where he sets out again to walk the whole way. Despite his family’s best efforts, nothing can dissuade Woody from the fact it’s all a scam. Sensing the significance of the pilgrimage, Woody’s youngest son, David, reluctantly agrees to drive him there.

So begins a trip where David tries to discover more about his evasive father, and it's here where the humour really kicks in since Woody is practically impenetrable. When he sees Mount Rushmore, Woody declares "it looks unfinished, like someone got bored." He tells his son that drinking beer "ain’t really drinking," and that he got married and had two sons because he "liked to screw... and your mother’s Catholic… so you work it out." But underneath the deadpan expressions we guess at a complex man who has endured terrible disappointments in life.

Whilst not the hardest drinking character on the list, there is a sense of huge cumulative damage in Woody’s psyche, beer after beer, year after year. Dern’s performance is terrific in combining dry humour with melancholia, for there is a true sadness to Woody’s quest for riches; He is gullible and bored, yes, but Woody wanted to believe he’d won so badly that it could somehow make up for everything that had gone before.