#29: On Nomadland
Moral of the story is that film school has ruined my ability to watch a movie like a normal person.
Hi friends,
So, I finally watched Nomadland after it made Oscar history last week (director Chloé Zhao becoming the first woman of colour to win Best Director, in case you’ve been living under a rock).
I have mixed feelings on the film. I adore the cinematic language; in terms of aesthetic, pacing, performance, etc, it is the type of film to make me think to myself, ‘I would love to have made that movie’. (Even the hazy desert colour palette is right up my street.) Chloé Zhao’s directorial style is quiet and assured. The cinematography, by Joshua James Richards, is masterfully, melancholically spare. I’m not the first person to make a Terrence Malick comparison. And the film doesn’t feel dense. I appreciate that quietude more than anything in a film—perhaps because I’m becoming increasingly aware of how difficult it is to step back and allow a story to unfurl itself, rather than taking a temptingly heavy expository hand, and the sophistication of narrative that emerges as a reward for such restraint.
On the metanarrative level, though, I had questions. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one. The film’s relatively warm attitude toward Amazon has garnered sharp critique, particularly as it deviates from the original source material—Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction tome, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century—which by contrast delved heavily into economic critique. ‘I thought there was a lot about the film that was very beautiful but it left more than a bitter taste in my mouth,’ Tim Shadix of California-based nonprofit advocacy organisation Warehouse Worker Resource Center, tells Joshua Keating of Slate, ‘It shows Amazon as a place to make money and enable someone’s personal journey, not really dealing with how dark it is that you have companies that are taking advantage of often senior people who should be retired but, because of economic circumstances, are working in horrifically dangerous jobs.’
The other thing I wondered about was the message that the ending imparts. I don’t want to spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the ultimate takeaway the film provides, at least on surface, is that desperation may draw people into the nomad life, but it is choice—the distinctly USAmerican cocktail of rugged individualism, manifest destiny, and pride—which keeps them there. And this ethos of individualism points to a larger ethos of autonomy, of what is essentially informed consent: an awareness of one’s decision-making as an individual, not as a cog in a larger power structure out of one’s control. Is that the case, really, though? The film doesn’t get into that.
Protagonist Fern has decisions foisted upon her by societal circumstance, but the film is oblique and brief with its criticism of the conditions which have permitted these circumstances to occur, focusing largely instead on Fern’s personal journey of growth, grief, and life as an individual making individual decisions. The story follows this tack as well. Keating notes in Slate that the scene in which Fern shits in a bucket is an Oscar-bait notch in Frances McDormand’s belt, whereas Zhao would never have asked one of the actual nomads, portraying their real selves, to do the same on screen. For them, because of the differential in power dynamics, this would unquestionably be demeaning. The scene therefore works, on the meta cinematic level, specifically because of the context of implicit exceptionalism that we as an audience bring to our viewing. Late in the film, Fern repeatedly rebuffs offers of a more comfortable life. We know her character well enough at this stage to understand, on the personal level, the pride and other factors that go into this decision.
But there’s also the fact that, from the screenwriter’s perspective, Fern can’t choose the easy out because then it would read as implausible: deus ex machina for a neat Hollywood ending. She must choose the independent route, because that’s what this film is about. But in real life, for every nomad who actively relishes the freedom and autonomy of life on the road, there are many others who most likely are stuck there by circumstance and would indeed take up the offer of a more financially and geographically stable life. To go there would mean making Nomadland a very different film: a more overt critique of the structural reasons that vulnerable people fall through cracks or are left behind. It would also mean investigating the ripple effects of this phenomenon. (We all know who rural white working-class boomers in red regions left behind by industry voted for in 2016 and 2020.) A different film would have looked at how Trumpism fomented in precisely the spaces that these characters move through—and done so in a way that isn’t, as Keating brutally puts it, ‘Hillbilly Elegy with an MFA’.
The more the movie veers into the sort of character study that a great actor can sink their teeth into,’ Keating writes, ‘its story becomes one of Fern Being Fern. When the film offers Fern a way out of poverty and she chooses not to take it, it’s effectively saying, “Hey, some people are just meant to live this way,” which is what rich people have told themselves about poor people for as long as those two groups have existed.’ Arguably, perhaps all of this is the film’s whole point. I’m not sure. Personally, I think Keating is quite harsh in his assessment of Nomadland. I want to think that the film is self-aware of these critiques, that the film is itself in fact critiquing the foolish grandeur of individualism within the sweep of a larger critique on the US’s lack of social safety nets and the desolation that this reality imposes. Zhao is a filmmaker who, throughout her career thus far, has demonstrated a granular understanding of human nature and emotion.
But in my opinion, Nomadland is at its strongest in the moments where it functions as a character study: the real nomads talking candidly about their lives. The compassion, space, and care that Zhao takes in framing those scenes—visually, narratively—is breathtaking. Although McDormand brings necessary star power and undeniable acting genius to the film (and was actually the one who introduced Zhao to the source material in the first place) her character’s fictional arc is the weakest, or least compelling, element of the film for me. I will grant that this may be partly due to my predilection for documentary. But mostly, I wanted the film to continue its gently incisive meander through the lives of people as they exist, as left-behind outsiders and as members of their own communities, and how they navigate both worlds.
If you’ve seen the film, let me know your thoughts—I’d like to hear.
Catch you next week,
Maddy