Review of Nomadland (2021) by M_I_K_E_ — 21 Feb 2021

If you think Nomadland is a great movie you fit into one of two categories:

1. You’re either easily emotionally manipulated (i.e., you cry during hallmark movies), or 2. While you know New York (or fill in the blank here with your city> doesIf you think Nomadland is a great movie you fit into one of two categories:

1. You’re either easily emotionally manipulated (i.e., you cry during hallmark movies), or.

2. While you know New York (or fill in the blank here with your city> does not comprise the entirety of humanity, you need a reminder every once in a while that there’s a whole world out there with different people and (what? really?) nature (gasp!).

Emotional manipulation is easy - sprinkle in great cinematography, an excellent score, (you can probably stop there for most of us), but also throw in poetry, sprinkle in a few poignant stories from real people with close-ups of the always stoic Frances McDormand reacting to those real stories – shake, and voila! The producers and director of this movie-mentory, or docu-movie, or whatever, went to great lengths to make sure we knew most of the actors in this movie are not actors at all, but real people to get the greatest impact from their mostly sad vignettes. I’m glad they decided to not bite off anything controversial – glossing over the long shifts of an Amazon worker, and only very briefly showing the hard labor of a beet harvester (insert clip of Francis struggling to lift a bag of beets here) – but in a film of this type, where most of the heavy lifting is done by real actors, doesn’t there either need to be some story arc or at least a small lesson? What they did beautifully is present the juxtapositioning of relationships and nature. Linda or Patty (sorry, they kind of run together for me now) gives a very heartfelt dialog about going to Alaska again to swim with the sharks (or something) before she dies and I’m thinking – OK, now we're going to get to the meat of this thing. Is she going to leave her friends and the relationships she’s built to die alone in Alaska? But what I realized is - there really wasn’t much in the way of relationships (at least shown in the film) for her to leave. Every time the camera dolly would follow Francis through the camp, we didn’t see much human interaction. Sure, men would sit with pets on their laps, or someone would play the guitar, or people would sit staring into a fire, but nothing very meaningful from a humanity standpoint was going on. I would go to Alaska too! And this is where the film let us down. There’s a sliver of a chance for great art here - a Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson) opportunity to show the loneliness of people – a chance to cut the film to help us appreciate the family and friendships we have. I’m not saying that Francis had to end up staying with Dave at the end, but make us feel the emotional toll of that decision. Instead, they decided not to make any statements at all – to, I suppose, let the film “speak for itself”. The problem is it does not.