Nomadland (2020)

Written by Justin Marcel Jimenez, March 17, 2021.

Nomadland? More like No-plot-land. It is not as good as what I was expecting. The film follows Fern (Frances McDormand), an itinerant who lives in a van and travels around the country in a not-so-believable search for the meaning of life. Does she ever find it? I'm not sure; the close ups and shoddy direction never got to evince such emotive cues.

Frances McDormand's performance was ok. Not great, but ok. I'm not sure if she is a neurotic psychopath incapable of feeling sadness, but she is oddly too happy to be a homeless bum throughout the film. There is no dynamism to her acting. She is all up, and no down, and that made this movie really unexciting. The plot, as I said, is nowhere, man. Nothing to motivate the viewing of this film or keep the narrative going. Just a pretentious attempt at a character piece that is was not properly executed due to the fact that the protagonist and people in the movie are below one-dimensional. I hated the existence of living by the third "act," if there is even any semblance of intellectual structure to the piece. The emotional climax of the film, which was supposed to be this existential moment surrounding the death of one of the nomads, was so lazily built up that there was no true emotional investment. The audience is left thinking, "Did I miss something?" Do I care about these characters?" The answer to both questions is, "Not much."

Nomadland is not all bad. What makes this movie somewhat good is the cinematography, which is actually extremely impressive. The main character is not Fern; it is the great American frontier, the gorgeousness of the Western landscape. The Arizona sunsets caught on film might leave you breathless- not to mention the shots of mountainous terrains and basking in riprarian delight. Frances McDormand is charming and cute, even if you find her to be somewhat of a weird adult-child most the time. What the film does successfully is point out the the housing crisis and plight of the average working-class individual. It also strongly suggests the difficulty of what many middle-aged and elderly people (in this case, an older widowed woman) must do to survive without means in this country. Even with a "good job" at Amazon, she is unable to find stability, and cannot afford to live in anything more than her van. If anything, the film shows you in its tear-inducing overture the hardships of the American economy, displaying the average citizen's struggle to make ends meet even with a higher than minimum wage job.

The film's message was not enough to make up for the awkward technical inlays of its portrayal of its characters or the driving of the story. The movie did make me want to travel and feel like the best things in life were free, but the jejune acting was too overwrought and ultimately took away from any seriousness of the picture. Perhaps more subtlety and nuance in the performance, editing, shot selection, and musical cues would have made this a less boring ride. I was expecting this movie to be the shit, but its amateur direction and lack of character development made it out to be nothing more than a big, old bucket of poo.

7/10 vues.