Nomadland

I first heard of director Chloe Zhao when she was announced as the director of The Eternals. There was much fanfare over getting an Academy Award-winning director to helm an MCU movie. I'd not seen any of her work, so The Eternals was my first exposure to her. She was heralded as a visionary, someone whose work had so much soul and artistry to it. I was interested to see what she'd do with the MCU. As it turned out, she put out my lowest-rated MCU movie by a country mile, as she made a visually impressive but emotionally inert budget JLA rip-off. But the whole of the MCU post-Endgame has struggled to even be very good, so perhaps this was the hand of Disney choking out an artist's vision in favor of commerce. Now that I've seen Nomadland, I know that is not the case. As far as I'm concerned, Chloe Zhao is arthouse Michael Bay. Yeah, I said it, and I'll die on this hill. I'd do a story summary, but that would imply Nomadland has a story. Or a character arc. Or development. Or stakes. Or any goddamned component of a movie. Zhao has taken the phrase "slice of life" in the most literal sense possible and presented a year or so (maybe, the movie makes little to no attempt beyond passing comments to indicate the actual passage of time) in the life of an aging baby boomer that, by choice, lives out of her van and takes part time jobs around the country. We see her go to Arizona and get a job for a while. Then she goes to another location we don't know and gets a job. And another. And another. There's other people in the van living community that pop up again and she interacts with them. We see her snippets of her daily routine. This is it. That's all there is to Nomadland. I'm sure someone is going to say how the movie is about letting go of the past and being comfortable with yourself, and I have two responses to that. First is that there are HUNDREDS of movies that explore themes of self-realization and coming to terms with trauma or regret that actually have arcs and stakes and dramatic heft to them. As I write this, I have been awake less than an hour, I haven't had coffee, and I was still able to think of an example that does this well: Somebody I Used To Know. Oh, here's another one: 2014's Wild. All of these show the journey of the main character and let the viewer see how they find themselves and begin to heal. Nomadland doesn't. Nomadland is too busy showing beautiful landscapes, or holding on a dust-covered coffee mug, as if that is some profound statement on the human condition. It isn't, it's an old cup. And the second response to this is that Zhao's vision of character development seems to be to take an amazing actress in Frances McDormand, and insinuate her growth through staring off in the middle distance, or watch her float in a river, or touch that dusty coffee cup. Don't have her react, or say anything, or emote to any of this. Just have her do these actions with the same expression she has while putting together a jigsaw puzzle in a laundromat. It's often said that a good movie shows instead of tells. Zhao seems to think that NEITHER are necessary, that she can just half-heartedly infer, and that's good enough. It isn't. And while McDormand does all she can with what little she's given, another problem I had is her character, Fern. I don't like her. I don't feel sympathetic for her. Life didn't turn out the way she wanted, so she wallows. I found her to be the embodiment of the leopards eating faces meme; someone who made their choices, and when they got to the consequences that everybody but her could see coming, is in disbelief that it happened to them. It doesn't feel like she chooses the van living life; it feels like she's resigned herself to it, but is too proud, too stubborn, or too lazy to do anything else. The van living lifestyle, too, isn't presented in a great light, as there's this leader of the movement that comes off more like a spiritual guru-type, whose pontifications on being ahead of the coming collapse of society sound like some crackpot, tinfoil hat-wearing gibberish. I'm not saying the lifestyle is wrong or bad, everybody's entitled to live their life, and I'm sure that for those that choose it, it fulfills their needs, and God bless 'em. But within this movie, van living is presented by Zhao as superior to living in a house with modern amenities because some crackpot hobo says it's staying ahead of some imaginary collapse-of-society curve. It's the kind of conspiracy theory ravings that any sane, rational person would dismiss as lunacy. It all goes back to the comparison I made earlier about Zhao and Bay, although I'll give Michael Bay credit; he isn't aiming for critical acclaim. He isn't trying to produce some profound treatise on the human soul. He makes big, loud, dumb movies with explosions and car chases that your brain in low power mode. He's up front about that. Doesn't make his movies great, or even good, but it makes them honest. Zhao, and by extension Nomadland, has delusions of grandeur. None of the human beings occupying roles in it have any depth to them, and when a movie has McDormand and David Strathairn as the two notable actors in it and it finds a way to make them boring, that's quite an achievement, albeit not one to be proud of. I give credit where its due in that it is beautifully shot, and McDormand and Strathairn do all they can with what little they're given. But I couldn't recommend this movie to anybody, except maybe insomniacs looking for a sedative, and I sure as hell don't understand how this won any awards over the competition it had that year.