Review of Nomadland (2021) by Ahmedaiman1999 — 17 Mar 2021

I found Chloé Zhao's sophomore effort, The Rider, a truly poignant authentic and honest portrait of its hero and I was amazed by how its cinematography draws us very close to him in the personal moments not only with its effective close-ups but also by reflecting our main character's feel of emptiness and loss in the gloomy atmosphere that prevails the entire film. However, I honestly struggled to finally get to its brilliant tear-jerking ending, simply because of its deliberate pace that never picks up even when the story demands that. Here, things are evidently different. No doubt Nomadland is a very slow-paced movie, but it has a perfect tone and the movie, consequently, rarely, if ever, drags.

A further testament of Chloé Zhao's remarkable artistic maturity, and what I genuinely loved about Nomadland, is the staggering balance it strikes between between everything it tackles from its major themes and main concepts to its minor underling details. Most notably between offering a social commentary that's relevant in the present economic environment and weavering an intricate realistic portrait of the downtrodden, underdogs, forgotten and lost individuals with an almost complete disregard to focusing on a specific social strata.

By embracing realism and detaching it from all its oft-affiliated cinematic clichés, Zhao has also managed to walk a tightrope between depicting the "Nomads" life as a salvation for our Fern and her likes and the representing this new lifestyle as a total failure that resulted from a desperate search for belongness. It's true that we see Fern striving to adapt to this new life style with all its rigors and hardships while overcoming her grief in the process, but it's evident that she "belongs" to nature because that's only where she can get the feel of freedom. We see that her conversations with other broken-hearted people alleviate their pain in the sense of "life goes on, anyway", but we barely see them offering a consoling arm around each others' shoulders.

Nomadland is poetic achievement that blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction by representing a marginalized people whom we very much recognise but also by making its titular land a realistic fictional haven for people who find their identity by letting their souls roam in the spacious wilderness, all that while serving as a tribute to the travel lovers by merely capturing the ethos of wanderlust.