Nomadland

#93 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

Nomadland is one of those prime examples of why the Academy is being left behind by the larger culture. It’s a dull, ugly little film that has far less to say than it thinks and received all of the awards. There’s precious little craft even on display, Chloe Zhao choosing to simply film in natural light as much as possible which does not end up having the elegiac effect of a Malick/Lubezki film but instead just results in a drab, desaturated look that is often hard to even see. Throw in the fact that most of the “drama” (more like dramatic readings, though that would give too much credit to the writing by Zhao since the best moments are improvised by non-traditional actors) are done by side-characters rather than our main actors, and you’ve got a film of moments that accounts up to little and is mostly just kind of boring along the way.

Empire, Nevada was a company mining town that got shut down, its zip code even being made obsolete by the US Postal Service, and Fren (Frances McDormand) is a widower of the area and one of the last to leave. She’s been relegated to live in her van in the cold climate, working seasonally for Amazon, and having one good friend in Linda (Linda May) who tells her about the nomad lifestyle as advocated by Bob Wells (himself). It’s a lifestyle that eschews being tied down to any one place, living on the road and simply as one takes in the beauties of the American countryside. Fern decides that because the winters where she is are so bad and her contract with Amazon up she’s going to go and join Linda on this little sojourn.

The highlight of the film are the people like Linda May, Charlene Swankie, and Bob Wells himself who actually do exemplify the life being shown on screen. Swankie gets a lot of screentime early. She’s an older woman, dying of cancer with an arm in a sling, trying to get rid of all the crap she’s accumulated over the years, and with a dream of seeing a specific natural phenomenon once more (bats flying out of their holes on a river) before she dies. The frustrating thing about all of this is that Fern mostly just kind of watches as people talk for the first half of the film. We get footage of her puttering around the camp, taking in a seminar about repairing tire punctures, looking off stonelike into the distance, and then these minor, non-professional actors actually pouring their hearts out.

Something approaching a story eventually rears its head with the introduction of Dave (David Strathairn), another nomad that Fern runs into a couple of times, first at the nomad camp and second at an RV park where Linda and Fern get temporary employment. It’s there that Dave invites Fern to join him northward in South Dakota to work a temporary job at Wall Drug where Dave’s son James (Tay Strathairn) tracks him down to tell him about his incoming grandson. There’s obviously some attraction from Dave to Fern, though Fern is played so minimally that it’s hard to discern much from her but polite disinterest in return. They separate, and Fern ends up having to make her way to her sister’s house when her van breaks down, creating the contrast of Fern’s nomad lifestyle with the sedentary lifestyle of her sister.

It takes a long time to get into Fern’s background, and it’s one of those bits of narrative holding back that feel unnecessary, like we need to have some kind of mystery about why Fern is like this to drive us through the episodic events as they unfold. Essentially, she chose to stay tied to Empire, Nevada because of her deceased husband and then refused to move after his death, so she’s got pent up wanderlust, or something. It’s so minor that it didn’t affect me beyond making me want to roll my eyes (I resisted).

And that ends up the “point”: some people want to wander. And the vehicle for that is largely a cipher who barely emotes, keeps people at a distance, and barely talks. That Frances McDormand spent 4-5 months in a van, living this life, for this feels like a waste of her life and talent.

The visuals are another frustration. Zhao and her cinematographer, Joshus James Richards, often miss magic hour, that handful of minutes between sundown and dusk, and leave the sun visible in the background so that everything is backlit, making it simply hard to see what we’re looking at. This is honestly just bad natural photography. It’s not pretty, and it’s often hard to see.

Yeah, Hollywood vociferously participated in the lockdown mania meaning that the box office for 2020 was a mess, opening the doors for some minor, indie fare to sweep in and win Best Picture. But, you know what? Minari was right there, and Minari is kind of wonderful with a point and is often just beautiful to look at.

Rating: 1.5/4