Nomadland

Life boiled down to its essence is a series of boring events - showering, eating, driving, shopping, and finding a place to park your van. Life when you are broke is sad. The movie begins with the closing of a plant in Nevada where a widow played by Francis McDermott has worked for many years. The entire town moves away, leaving the post office to discontinue the use of the zip code. She lives in her van and travels around the west on a shoestring. Lots of quiet spaces and lengthy shots of the countryside. McDermott meets a lot of poor people who share their modest philosophies and their strategies for dealing with life on the road. She takes a series of temporary jobs, then moves on. It's not completely dreary, but it is not an upper. It's slow and depressing. The script was empty. The cinematography was marginal. The direction was slow and there were gaps in the film that are not explained. It is difficult to evaluate the acting when the story is so vapid. It's a hard pass for me.

When people put themselves in vulnerable positions, bad things can happen. This is a human interaction movie which shows us believable people, meeting and gaining sparks from one another. Francis McDormand has become a premier actress. She's not attractive in a movie star sense, but she has one of the most expressive faces I've ever seen in film. Granted, we don't get to see the harsh side of the equation, which would include theft, intimidation, physical harm, and mental illness. Nevertheless, I found myself transfixed. She worked so hard and her spirit was seldom defeated. How can people be giving this a one. It tells me how jaded we have become. I guess there is a faction that feels the need to take down something that is hyped as if they have some power in their shortsightedness. I'm not saying it is a perfect movie but to say it is paint drying? I guess there weren't enough superheroes or aliens in it.

Many reviewers found that the rough life of nomads in the US has been idealised and that the movie does not really show the daily hardships they endure. I agree. But the movie is about something else. The main character, the great Frances McDormand, is not happy but it is resilient. She is not a good person in particular but can be kind and warm to others and kind and warm to herself. She lives her life unfazed by the hardships she has to endure and that have sucked most of the vitality or feelings out of her. She is not capable to settle down, not capable to fall in love, not capable to make friends or laugh or have a good time. As if ever since her husband died and the town that she lived in disbanded her soul has been taken away as well. The movie ends with her visiting her former town and finding her empty home. It looks less hospitable than her tiny van, where she spends all her life. But the empty house might be also a metaphor for her heart, her soul, her body depleted of all energies. Fern- what a lovely name - does not really live as a nomad. She merely lingers the vast American plains, surviving and resisting. The movie is about resilience, is about injustice and hardship. It shows all these in the most wonderful way.

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source: Nomadland

It's a very slow paced movie. There are countless scenes in which I thought were dragged out for too long and should've been edited out. I actually took my eyes off the screen and started checking my phone at times -- that's not a very good sign! I don't think there was a real purpose or end goal to Nomadland other than showing us a person going from one dead-end job to the next.

See those images of Frances McDormand walking thru a bleak sunset landscape? There are dozens and dozens of those shots. They make up the bulk of the film, as if the makers were thrilled with "Days of Heaven" and it's minimalist photography. But that film at least had two characters to interact for a story to develop. This film is basically a solo effort where we are to get character, motivation, inner thoughts all from McDormand's face in closeup. This could have been a "Grapes of Wrath" type of film, based on its subject matter and milieu. However, you know what motivated the Joads, but McDormand's character offers very little insight as to what drives her

... and in the end, all we have is what we remember. A thoughtful, contemplative and reflective piece of storytelling, riven and scored with meaning and significance, your interpretations uniquely your own. With outstanding performances all round, as sincere as any you will encounter in film, brought to life through great direction and translation with captivating, mesmerising cinematography and the sublime Frances McDormand.

Let's get the obvious point out of the way first: Frances McDormand is a national treasure. She may well be the ranking American actress, and she conveys an "everywoman" aura that is almost hypnotic. The lines on her face, a limitation for many actresses, are an outstanding feature for her. Now, as for the movie: As many have observed, there's scarcely a beginning, middle, or end. We're told how Fay got to be on the road, we see a handful of interactions with others, we get some gorgeous cinematography, and repeat; and repeat again. Life isn't half-bad for Fay and the people she encounters; as bad as it gets is a flat tire or a "helpful" friend inadvertently breaking a beloved piece of china. Somehow, there's money to pay for more serious problems. Other reviews have summarized dozens of ways that the life hinted at here is actually far more harsh than we see. In many ways, this plays as the first episode of a limited TV series about being on the road. In my humble opinion, despite the gorgeous sunsets, such a pilot would not have been picked up. One final thing, and perhaps my biggest problem - it's sometimes referred to as the "observer effect." In a movie filled with dozens of "real" people, the interior of a real Amazon, and so on, I found myself constantly wondering about the crew hovering on the edge of the screen with lights and cameras and a director. It really took me out of the movie. Apparently, it worked for the amateur cast; there's a story on the Internet about one of the amateur leads being really moved by hearing a sad story from Fay; once the scene ended, he was stunned when McDormand reminded him that she was acting, and everyone described in the story was actually alive and well. I guess it's great that Ms. McDormand is such a great actress that these real people believed her in real time. But for me, I wondered how real people could melt into being characters in a movie.