Homesick, and I haven't even been to Nebraska

Alexander Payne's Nebraska (2013, written by Bob Nelson) is a wonderful film.  Starkly beautiful, achingly desolate, filled with eccentric characters that in the hands of a lesser filmmaker would come across as stupid social stereotypes played for cheap laughs.
Don't get me wrong, I laughed, I laughed quite a bit, but it was because I understood, and related to, the characters on the screen.  Not as some sociologist observing rural America from behind a one way mirror, but as someone who grew up in a town filled with similar faces, decade long grudges and colloquialisms that were unique, but never strange.
The strange thing is that Payne reminded me so much of my growing up years in a town in north east Canada, next to a military base built in the middle of nowhere, populated by former, or decedents of, trappers and fisherfolk.  Payne's Billings to Lincoln road trip is full of plowed farm fields, bales of hay and herds of cattle.  My Happy Valley, Labrador was full of cords of winter wood, snowmobile trails and the occasional skid of salt cod (from a costal relative). I will say I did see a herd of caribou on a roadtrip from Ottawa to visit my mom, but trust me, they weren't domesticated livestock.
Even with all these geographic, occupational, climate differences Nebraska brought me closer to home, even more than movies by people on the island part of the province I grew up on.  Watching Nebraska I saw the small town soul, where you are not competing with architectural marvels, or a tossed salad of wonderfully diverse faces and cultures.  A town's heart is the people, who have often been there as long as the first buildings.  Valley-folk know the first families that settled there, who followed next, who married who, where they're buried, even what branch of the family tree you're sitting on.
And its with this close-knit small community of people the short hand develops, salutations become very local.  A smile came to my face watching Nebraska when the question "How long did it take you?" was asked because it brought back a flood of memories of being greeted by friends' parents with the question "And who's your father?", I knew the "hello" and "how are you" were implied in that opening question, I knew the shorthand.  The whole script is in that shorthand.  So much is conveyed in short sentences of monosyllabic responses that I could almost see the script being not even 10 pages long, but carrying an encyclopedia of emotion, and history in every single line.  Woody's (Bruce Dern) explanation on why he embarked on his journey is one sentence, ONE SENTENCE! and yet it is spoken with a lifetime of experience behind it.  And the climax of the film is so simple, so perfect, so full of emotionless emotion, yeah, many lumps appeared in my throat.
I could be all film nerdy and gush on about Nebraska, the brilliant performances, cinematography, music, but I won't.  What Nebraska did for me was bring me back to where I came from, to people that I love and miss, warts and all.  It gave me small town without the flagrant yokel, and showed a world of honest blue collars.  It made me homesick without even knowing where I came from.  It reminded me of the shorthand I knew.
It was a wonderful reminder.