Nomadland
Nomadland is the clear front-runner for Best Picture, but what makes Chloé Zhao's film one of the best of the year?
Every year we get a narrative around the best picture race at the Oscars that generally narrows down the legitimate contenders to two or three films months before the ceremony. It presents a chicken and egg type situation where the media coverage shapes the voting or if the early voting shapes the media coverage. Last year it was a battle between Parasite and 1917. We had the Moonlight and La La Land year in 2017. Based on the voting so far this year, I don't think we have had a front-runner quite as large as Nomadland in a while. Of the 40 awards given out to best picture as I write this, 23 have gone to Nomadland. Promising Young Woman and Minari are tied for second with just four each. Ultimately, awards aren't everything, and they don't determine the quality of a movie. Still, with or without a best picture Oscar, Chloé Zhao directed a masterpiece and one of the best movies of the year.
Chloé Zhao is one of the most talented filmmakers in the world right now, and she has this particular ability to blend what is real and fake better than just about anybody else working right now. Nomadland uses only two actors, Frances McDormand and David Strathairn. Zhao's 2018 critically acclaimed The Rider appears to use zero actors. Her 2015 film Songs My Brother Taught Me has just two actors in it. The idea of using "real" people when you're just starting as a director isn't out of the ordinary due to budgetary constraints, but Nomadland was funded by Disney and had a budget close to $5 Million. At that point, it is clearly a choice not to use actors, and it makes the rest of Zhao's abilities shine around them.
Perhaps it is because when I think of the term "filmmaker," it makes me think more of the scenery and the shots than I do the script or the acting, but no other filmmaker right now has their fingerprints all over their movie as Zhao does. Sure, each director has their style that comes through when you're watching it, whether it be the lively dialogue of a Greta Gerwig film or the lens flare of someone like J.J Abrams, but Zhao's films feel like her own style definitively. Part of that style is how beautifully her movies are shot. The cinematography with the landscape shots is just pure perfection, especially when paired with an outstanding score. It is the best cinematography I have seen this year—major credit to Joshua James Richards. He has been the cinematographer for all three of Zhao's films and will hopefully receive recognition for his work at the Oscars.
Having no real actors and shooting as brilliantly as she does, allows the words to take a back seat and everything surrounding them to shine through. Zhao captures the essence of people better than most other directors right now. If you asked me to quote a specific line from Nomadland or The Rider, nothing would immediately come to mind, but I could tell you exactly how I felt when Fern was walking around the park early on or when Brady visited Lane in the hospital. Zhao does not necessarily rely on heavy dialogue or even a coherent linear story to get her message across and connect with audiences.
Part of it is because I don't seek them out often, but Zhao does this thing where she instantly creates empathy toward people that I have nothing in common with. All great filmmakers do this, but Zhao explores stories and people not seen in modern cinema that often, or at least in things I typically gravitate toward. She showed a side of the cowboy that isn't the popular perception. She acted as a documentarian of sorts when looking at the nomads. She accomplishes this connection because she explores what makes us the same instead of our differences. It sounds hokey, but the universal aspects of her films is one of the things that makes them so outstanding. I don't need to be a 60-something person living in my van to relate to Fern.
The magic of Nomadland is not in telling a relatable story, but rather in showing a relatable character and somehow turning her into someone anyone can relate to; it is the same magic that takes place in Lady Bird. The way that Frances McDormand fully inhabits Fern is what is going to likely give her an Oscar next month. We don’t know a ton about her life prior to the events in Nomadland. We know she lived in Empire, Nevada, and worked at a gypsum mine that shut down in 2011 in the wake of the great recession. The whole town of Empire virtually vanished a few months after that when its zip code was discontinued.
We also learn that Fern’s husband passed away. That is about all we know about Fern’s life before becoming a nomad. While going deeper into her background may make for a more well-rounded character, it doesn’t hinder the movie in a significant way because of everything surrounding her. The lack of specificity in her background also makes the film more universal.
On its surface, Nomadland is a film about the trials and tribulations of living on the road in your van or trailer. Perhaps it is an inspiration for someone thinking about living a similar life. You go from park to park and see the beauty of the country, captured brilliantly by Zhao. The film is so much more than that, though. Nomadland is a film about human connection, grief, and having a sense of community despite the trauma around you.
The way that Zhao is able to capture emotion so effortlessly and create empathy is remarkable and makes me so confused as to why she is directing Marvel’s Eternals, tentatively scheduled to come out on November 5th. Zhao’s strength is when she can dive deep into how people feel and get those intimate moments, like when everyone was around the fire saying they’ll see Swankie down the road. Marvel is not known for those types of moments as much. The franchise thrives off many interconnecting storylines and tying each one with the other 20 plus movies. Eternals is rumored to have a budget of around $200 Million, 40 times more than Nomadland. I don’t doubt the brilliance of Chloé Zhao, and I will undoubtedly watch the movie to support her, but it just seems like a choice akin to Star Wars tabbing Rian Johnson to direct The Last Jedi. I just hope Zhao is able to direct the movie she wants without too much interference from Marvel, and she is still able to create the same emotion that she has created up to this point in her career.
Zhao shows that having the right support system around you can make a significant difference. Fern probably could have survived without Linda May, Swankie, Dave, and everyone else she met during her journey, but they undoubtedly made her experience significantly better. These people all come from different backgrounds, and on the surface, they should not be as tightly knit as they are, but they all seemingly have one thing in common: being let down by the myth of the American Dream.
Children are told if they work hard from a young age, play their cards right, and pull themselves up by their bootstraps that everything will work out for them. We see it throughout our culture, from movies like Wall Street and Hillbilly Elegy to “feel-good” stories of kids running lemonade stands to pay for medical bills or a college education. This is pretty obviously complete nonsense, and one particular scene in Nomadland drives the point home. A woman is talking about her friend who passed away from liver cancer around the time of his retirement. She decided at that moment to retire as soon as she could and start living her life because, in her words, she didn’t want her sailboat to sit in her driveway. She decided to bring her “sailboat” to the desert.
This film shows that you can do everything right and work as hard as you can for your entire life, but at the end of the day, those in charge don’t care about you, and you need to take control of your life. The commentary on the American Dream, and a couple of scenes of those “better-off” than Fern, is about as far as it takes it politically, which I wish they went deeper into but was probably the safer move. Would it have been nice to see them critique Amazon’s working conditions or talk more about the systemic issues that plague millions of older Americans when they are no longer deemed “valuable” by a capitalistic society? Sure, absolutely, but I also don’t know if it is fair to attack a movie for what it’s not when it is still an excellent film that connects with more people while playing it safe. It also does have something to say politically, particularly about class. It especially stands out in saying something when compared to the milquetoast neoliberal fantasy, and fellow Oscar contender, The Trial Of The Chicago 7.
The fact that they didn’t push it a little more politically has it just outside of my personal top tier of films of the year. It is excellent, but it fails to reach the heights of the overtly political Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Judas & The Black Messiah. However, if I had to bet, I think Zhao would probably rather have a few Oscars than be my favorite movie of the year, so she probably made the right call.
Speaking of the Oscars, I will make my predictions for the Oscar nominations next week ahead of the announcement on March 15th.