Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020) (Patreon)

My lovely wife Jen, who is, shall we say, "cinema adjacent," came in and out while I was watching Nomadland, and after it was over, she said flatly, "seems like that should've been a Kelly Reichardt film." And, well, she's not wrong. As much as I admired The Rider, I was concerned about Chloé Zhao making the move to a bigger budgeted, higher profile project this early in her career. And while Nomadland is by no means a failure, it does show the markers of an artist who has not solidified her creative personality just yet. 

In this regard, I suspect she was susceptible to suggestions -- like the aggressively maudlin soundtrack -- that someone like Reichardt would have nipped in the bud. Then again, I don't want to patronize Zhao. Maybe she just really has lousy aesthetic instincts. But Nomadland is absolutely a film that required less, not more, at every juncture. 

I recall that The Rider played at True/False, just like Boyhood did. The implication was clear: this was a fictional work that was firmly based on documentary principles, grounded in the hard facticity of what a camera could record in a given space and time. We were watching real people existing as themselves, with a slight diegetic pretext in place to provide a template for action. There's a lot of the same impulse behind Nomadland, since apart from the film's two marquee stars -- Frances McDormand and David Straithairn -- everyone is representing a barely fictionalized version of themselves.

And who they are, we learn, is the "nomad community," a loose collective of roving non-homeowners who travel, set up camp, and roam the countryside, striving for self-sufficiency. Some of them chose this life, not really fitting into conventional society for various reasons. Some, like Fern (McDormand), lost their homes because of crippling debt. A number of films in recent years have focused on individuals who have adopted a modern nomad / hobo lifestyle for various reasons -- Debra Granik's Leave No Trace, Denis Côté's Wilcox, and Reichardt's own Wendy and Lucy. But Nomadland is unique in that it examines a community, rather than a solitary figure or dyad.

This is what makes Nomadland most compelling, while simultaneously showing up its formal limitations. The members of the nomad group we meet, such as leader Bob Wells, and Fern's gruff confidant Swankie, are so unaffected before the camera that they essentially infect McDormand with the inadvertent glow of "acting." Make no mistake, she does a wonderful job. But we can never not see her making choices, having nuances responses, behaving according to the criteria of good screen acting. The people around her, meanwhile, are in a different world.

Although it is a completely different film in every way, Bruno Dumont's Camille Claudel 1915 is actually a worthwhile point of comparison. It was the first film in which Dumont situated a world-class actress (Juliette Binoche) among his objet trouvé non-performers from Lille. It required a delicate balancing act, and it didn't always work. But mostly it did, because Dumont and Binoche were able to strip away all of her cinematic affectations and existentially locate her among the women of the sanitarium, their fitful struggles of body and mind. 

Dumont achieved this with his seventh feature film, after twenty years of filmmaking. Maybe Zhao just wasn't ready to do this.