Nomadland (2020, Chloé Zhao) (Patreon)

54/100

Another instance of light dawning during the end/"opening" credits (we get only the title up front), which revealed to ignorant me that this apparent character study was adapted from the sort of broadly reported nonfiction account that sports an expository subtitle: Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. That knowledge makes retroactive sense of what puzzled me throughout, viz. the film's seeming uncertainty about whether its protagonist is an individual or a symptom. Is this a life that she's freely chosen, or has it been forced upon her by capitalism's merciless dictates? No points for guessing which of those two options I'd find more compelling, but a Barton Fink-style "Both, maybe?" might be the worst possible choice, and that's where Zhao decided to take it. Her skill at guiding nonprofessional actors through re-creations of their own experience remains impressive, and I perked up during sequences depicting the larger nomadic community, with McDormand's Fern functioning as more silent witness than focal point. And there are some strong traditionally dramatic stretches as well, most notably Fern's brief visit with her more conventionally-minded sister. But the thorniness of that dichotomy gets undermined by the lost-Empire backstory, and vice versa; Zhao tries to make Fern at once an iconoclast and a victim, as if there's some coherent middle ground that she's being denied. It's like a mournful-dirge version of Lost in America that opens with Albert Brooks being laid off by Amazon and setting out sans any nest egg whatsoever, but retains all of the Easy Rider posturing. A straight documentary probably would've been more incisive, really. Or, y'know, just read the book. Not everything needs to be a movie!