To me, NOMADLAND was a surprising choice for a Best Picture winner; it's unassuming and soft spoken, its plot is loose, there are no big emotional scenes, it has many moments of stillness, and at times seems downright meditative. Add to that a main character who is a woman over sixty and you have a film that doesn't seem like the usual Oscar glory material. It's possible that the recent movement to diversify the Oscar voters may have led to more openness to low key independent movies than splashy, big budgeted Hollywood affairs, like Aaron Sorkin's THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 (which I thought was going to win). Or maybe the Academy just wanted to embrace a road movie during the pandemic lockdown. Either way, I personally don't think that NOMADLAND was the best film of the year, but I do enjoy its lovely images and independent heroine.
It tells the story of Fern (Frances McDormand), a sixtyish recent widow who used to work at a now closed factory in Nevada . At the start of the movie she has decided to sell most of her belongings and live in her van, traveling from place to place to find work. In her travels she meets other people living the same lifestyle, who teach her some of the ways of life on the road. After her van breaks down, she doesn't have enough money for repairs, so she goes to visit her sister by bus. Her sister offers to let her live with her family, but she refuses, borrowing money for her repairs instead. On the road, she also meets Dave (David Strathairn) a fellow traveler who moves in with his children after becoming a grandfather. He asks her to stay with him, but she says no and hits the road once again.
Before it was a movie, it was a non-fiction book called Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century written by Jessica Bruder and published in twenty seventeen. The rights to the book were optioned by McDormand herself, and after seeing director Chloe Zhou's twenty seventeen film THE RIDER (another movie about an independent loner), asked her to write and direct it. For the shooting of the film Zhou and McDormand lived in vans like the characters for four months, and often used real people playing themselves instead of actors. Shot on a budget of around five million dollars, the film would eventually make six million in worldwide grosses (obviously the pandemic has affected its box office take).
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| Frances McDormand |
To me the most striking thing about NOMADLAND is just how real it feels. There is no attempt to sugarcoat Fern's life; she is poor and lives out of a small van, she has few possessions, and yes, she has to use a bucket as a toilet. And yet there is a beauty to her way of life, (like how she proudly shows another traveler how she has found ways to utilize the limited space of her van), and there's a dignity in her willingness to do the hard work that she needs to do to survive. I love the way that Zhou's camera moves smoothly through the gorgeous natural landscapes that Fern travels through, and the quiet way it shows Fern appreciating those landscapes while lying naked in a river or hugging a huge tree. The fact that Fern is alone in these scenes is telling; Zhou's script gives Fern no big speech about her desire to be independent because we can see it in the still moments like these. Here is a woman who misses her husband but now treasures her independence and time alone. But even more striking than the natural landscapes are the scenes towards the end of the film when Fern visits the now shuttered factory that she and her late husband used to work in. There's a striking beauty in the ruins of a once busy, now desolate building.
While Fern does make some friendships and connections, they are always at a distance. When Dave tentatively makes romantic gestures towards her, she gently turns him down. McDormand and Strathairn have a real nice chemistry; I really like the way he calmly tells her that he likes her, and the quiet way that she rebuffs him. I also enjoy the way that Dave's attempt to be helpful finds him accidentally breaking some of Fern's plates, one of the few moments of humor in the film. It's rare and refreshing to see people over sixty portrayed romantically (although they never even hold hands), but it's also no surprise to the audience that Fern doesn't move in with Dave; her independence has already been established earlier in the film when we see her turn down the chance to adopt a sweet dog (as a dog owner myself, it does bother me that she just leaves the poor pooch leashed to a bench!). The idea of a person who travels alone across the country, never wanting to settle down, is not new in movies, but such wanderers are usually male characters, and ending the film with a woman refusing to live with a man and taking to the road instead is a nice inversion of the usual cliche'.
McDormand, who is in every scene of the film, won her third Best Actress Oscar for this role, and again I find that a bit surprising given that the character is usually still and almost never raises her voice. But, to me, that's the beauty of her performance; when Fern talks about the loss of her husband, she isn't asking for pity, she's just laying out the truth of her life. When she works at tough jobs across the country, she never complains, even though her face shows the strain of her work. As I said, McDormand lived in a van for this role (and she also actually worked at some of the jobs shown on screen), and that gives her performance a sense of rightness, a feeling that this isn't just some Hollywood actress slumming. Her van feels lived in.
If the film has a flaw, it's that to me it does sometimes drags. Although I've already stated that I admire Zhou's decision to not have big emotions in the film, I do wish that there was more focus to the story. No, I don't want chase scenes or explosions, but maybe a little more about how Fern and her fellow travelers get by would have been nice. But my criticisms are mostly mild for what is a very successful film.
SO DID THE ACADEMY GET IT RIGHT?
While I think it's clear that I really enjoyed this film, I don't think that it was the best film of the year: I preferred Shaka King's JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH, Lee Isaac Chung's MINARI and, my personal favorite, Emerald Fennell's openly provocative PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN. Still, NOMADLAND is certainly not a bad choice, and it's great to see Zhao breaking ground as the second woman (and first Asian one) to win Best Director.
