Originally published December 2020
Is this movie seriously going to win Best Picture? By all accounts, Nomadland, directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Frances McDormand, is the odds-on favorite, which is bewildering, since it offers little in the way of artistic or entertainment value. Despite solid cinematography and acting, Nomadland’s thematic center is gooey and insincere. Its current critical acclaim, rest assured, will fade into disinterest with time.
Nomadland could only have appeared in the age of Instagram. The film’s imagery is reflective of the kind of superficial profundity that we ourselves have popularized on social media: a woman stands atop a cliff gazing at nature, a gathering of strangers sings around a campfire, big animals trudge across terrain. Zhao doesn’t have any insight as to why these scenes might be deep; she only knows that we’ve trained ourselves to think they are. Her movie thus devolves into, essentially, a collection of shallow images that we can easily get elsewhere or even stage ourselves. It’s been said that Nomadland is “lyrical” and “poetic;” if so, it’s surely Instagram poetry: its tagline might have been, #wanderlust.
And the sappy, social media flavor of this film pervades its narrative, too. The story follows Fern (McDormand), a forgotten victim of the Great Recession, whose hometown was shuttered when the plant closed down, and whose husband died long before that, leaving her totally adrift. It’s an intriguing backstory, but instead of seeing it fleshed out, we watch Fern serve primarily as a kind of sponge for others’ similarly sad stories, so that the movie can squeeze in as many of them as possible.
A nameless woman’s husband died of cirrhosis, for example. A man’s son committed suicide. And so on. These stories are heartfelt, but we only hear about them, never experiencing them for ourselves: the power of film is left untapped. In trying to herd so much untold sadness into one place, Zhao has made something closer to shareable CNN segments than a cohesive work of art.
The film’s high point comes early on, when a terminally ill companion of Fern’s delivers a monologue reflecting on her life and recounting a particularly touching moment of natural beauty. The delivery is great, and the descriptions are memorable—but even so, it still rings somewhat shallow. Pretty words are always nice, but without any insight or wisdom, they flutter away from us, groundless. Even the pinnacle of the movie, then, is more John Green than Shakespeare.
McDormand is one of our finest actresses, and here, as usual, she’s a bright spot. With her talents and the film’s serious, somber premise, Nomadland could have been so much more. It may do well at the Oscars, where sentimentality often rules the day, but it would still be an unusual entrant into the award season history books. After all, even the bland Green Book’s (2019) sentimentality was of the traditional, feel-good sort; Nomadland instead borrows the breathless, melancholy kind cultivated by my own generation of indie musicians and social media influencers.
I suppose they don’t call them influencers for nothing.
– Jim Andersen
For more reviews, see my review of Sound of Metal.