TIFF 20: Nomadland Exposes the Simple Beauty of Existence
At times it can be insidiously easy for a film to ascribe meaning to itself. We’ve all had the experience: you’re watching a movie, not particularly enjoying it, when suddenly some combination of images, ideas, and music stirs something in you emotionally. You realize, likely even as it’s happening, that these feelings have been manufactured, the machinery of the movie made evident as it mercilessly wrings a tear from your eye. The frustration those movies elicit make it all the more special when a film like Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland comes along. Anchored by a powerful naturalistic performance from Frances McDormand, nothing ever feels forced in Nomadland. Rather than ascribe meaning where none exists, Zhao’s simple, frank storytelling allows the natural profundity of life to reveal itself.
The film follows McDormand’s Fern, a woman who has quite literally lost everything. Her husband has passed away, and the place she once lived has become a ghost town after the mine shut down. This is not a tale of grief, however, but of new beginnings. Living in a renovated van, Fern becomes one of the titular nomads, finding new communities, friends, and jobs. The film is largely episodic in nature, a form I often find leaves feeling films disjointed; in Nomadland, the cyclical nature of characters exiting and re-entering, anchored by Fern’s steady presence, gives the movie a gentle rhythm. McDormand, who hasn’t acted in a live action film since her Oscar-winning turn in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is one of the few professional actors in the film, a departure for Zhao, whose work has almost exclusively used non-professionals. McDormand, whose public persona of late has been ‘steely-eyed straight shooter’, is a perfect fit for Zhao’s style, giving a simple, lived-in, and emotionally rich performance to match the film. It’s the same kind of performance she got from untrained actor Brady Jandreau as the lead in her previous feature The Rider.
Narratively and stylistically speaking, Zhao employs many of the same techniques she honed on that film — particularly her use of beautiful landscapes and her focus on the working class. Her camera often sits far back, exposing the majesty of the locations she shoots, including the South Dakota badlands where her first two features were set. These aren’t just pretty pictures though; the approach allows her characters a unity with their surroundings that is vital to the thematic pulse of the movie. Zhao contrasts these images with honest, non-judgmental portrayals of working Americans. Fern begins the film as a seasonal worker at Amazon, a job that by all accounts is hectic, stressful, and soul-sucking. While Zhao doesn’t conceal this fact, she makes an effort to show the tiny satisfying pleasures work like this can bring, most often in the form of people. As part of her journey, Fern works numerous jobs. She’s often working with friends — or makes new ones — and almost always in the service industry. In another film, an older woman working in these positions could easily be framed as demeaning and a means to an end. Instead, Fern seems to find a quiet dignity in working for what she has, and serving others in the process. And, as is so often the case, the good that comes out of them is borne out down the road.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Nomadland, however, is its lack of insistence. Ludovico Einaudi’s score is limited but striking, combining with vivid imagery to create some of the film’s most stirring moments. But the film is never masturbatory with its use of natural beauty, never favouring style over substance and delighting as much in a quiet shared moment between friends as it does in an incredible shot of a mountain rising into fog. Zhao draws a clear parallel between the beautiful, varied landscapes of the United States and the everyday people who occupy it. There is, she suggests, an intrinsic beauty in simplicity. It’s not just minimalism — the characters of the film might live in vans, but they still have prized possessions — but an appreciation of the basic building blocks of human connection. With Zhao’s confident steady hand ensuring things become neither cloying nor pretentious, Nomadland is a work that can speak to anyone, even those of us who haven’t done much travel recently.
