“We be the bitches of the badlands.”
‘Nomadland’ is one of those movies where nothing much happens, but it’s the type of movie you sit back and vibe with it.
This is a very attentive movie, where you journey along with this woman (played by Frances McDormand) who is fed up with her old life and decides to go off grid by traveling to different places while living in her van. She’s not homeless, just houseless. She is like a leaf that quietly and casually drifts from location to location. She encounters different people in this community, who are played by real nomads. Throughout the whole movie you are never in one place for too long, you just keep moving on.
I’ll give director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards major credit for they approach to a story like this. Zhao decision to include real nomads with their actual names in the movie as these characters made the story feel genuine and personal, which helps gives us a solid perspective on what life of a nomad is like but done in a respectful way that doesn’t intrude their lives. The cinematography from Joshua James Richards looks beautiful and does a great job showing off the Western landscape. Some locations can look so cold, and yet, other locations look so tranquil in the sunlight.
This movie is worth checking out just for Frances McDormand performance alone, as she is terrific in this movie. She plays Fern, an adventurous woman who is a child at heart, despite dealing with some personal issues from the inside that we are informed about briefly.
Also, I thought the real nomads were surprisingly good. I’m not sure if all the scenes with them are scripted or not, but either way I thought they were great.
While there’s a lot of things that I enjoyed and appreciated about this movie, but unfortunately it didn’t 100% connect with me on a emotional level. At first, I liked the whole open road freedom to the movie, because since the main character is never in one place, you too become a wanderer, but I also feel it misses the opportunity of a powerful character study, especially with a character like Fern when it’s clear that there’s more underneath the surface with her.
I found the pacing of the movie to be an issue for me, because with a two-hour runtime I would sometimes find myself losing interest in the characters and what was happening on screen, as the movie didn’t further develop or do anything with the content and ideas it presents.
While the music was appropriately used for certain scenes, but most of the time it felt really distracting and took me out of the scenes.
Overall rating: Again, there’s a lot of things that I appreciated about the movie and am interested in what Chloé Zhao has up her sleeves for Marvel’s ‘Eternals’, which I hope gives her the freedom to make whatever she wants in the late future, with the extra cash and name recognition.
It was just ok for me, not a very mystical movie that awes me enough. I'm someone who loves mystical stuff don't get me wrong, and the special effects of this show are pretty well done.. but it's not enough for me... Tbh, the only reason i found and watch this show was coz i found a gif of the part where she was with the monster sitting by the "buffet table" Lotsa people were also saying how good it was so i decided to give it a shot, sad to say it wasn't as impressive as i thought it would be. There were 2 parts which i found really stupid, 1 of them was the girl eating the grapes of course. Yea i know, she's juz a small girl and livin in her current condition, food should be something that she can't resist but like seriously? If you wanna die over a whole table of food, don't juz eat grapes? She even told the Faun "it was only 2 grapes..." my point exactly! LOL if u wanna risk dying over 2 grapes when u have a whole table of food, that's juz dummbbbb. Andddd with the creepy monster sitting there, u chose to eat with your back facing it? Like seriously, guess that monster wasn't creepy to her. (Maybe i'm too timid) It juz doesn't make sense to me at some point coz she knows how magical it is and the Faun specifically told her not to eat it but his advice juz fall on to death ears.. Makes me wonder, if u can't even follow simple instructions not to eat, why do u even bother bout coming out of the labyrinth before the hourglass run out of sand? "you'll only be in a better place with buffet" (Juz hafta be sarcastic LOL) And sadly, that's the only interesting part in the entire show, the creepy monster with his buffet and it didn't even last more than 10mins. Then there was the part Mercedes stabbed the captain, she walked out, then when the guards were chasing her, she juz ran a lil (maybe about 15 steps from the place) and stopped at a tree and then spaces out.. I was like huh? you're a lady and you know you're never gonna outrun them so you should have a headstart but no, she stops at the tree and let the guards juz catch up with her. Those were the 2 parts which i thought was really stupid. The rest of the show was juz alright. Definitely violent, Captain did a great job in the show but plot wise, the ending is considered a lil poor to me. As magical as they try to make it seemed for Ofelia, you gotta admit, she was the only one who can see those creatures coz her dad started that magical kingdom (I suppose).. So does this magic only work for Ofelia alone? Will anyone ever get to come across it and even if they do, why would they be allowed to join their kingdom if they are not related to Ofelia and her fam? And her mom was carrying a baby in the kingdom, was that her brother who was still alive in the real world? Is her brother gonna go through the same thing so that he can be a prince someday? So yea, overall.. juz an average film for me. =]
I wanted to like this so badly, but I couldn't quite get there. I have to stop going into movies with high expectations. I was waiting to be blown away but Nomadland is just not a good movie.
Were the characters interesting, the lack of plot could be justified. But I wasn't invested with Fern’s journey at all. She is abrasive with zero personality. Chloé Zhao has nothing interesting to say about the reality she portrays. That’s why most of the movie is just long shot of van driving with the same dramatic piano playing. It’s basically a cycle of Fern chatting, being outcast, and traveling while she displays the exact same expression. There's no character study. Not to come off as someone lacking empathy but I simply couldn’t care less about people in this movie. Thus I found the topic of Nomadland to be incredibly purposeless. It's because of the way Americans talk about themselves. Like, “even the poor in America are much better off then the average person in most other countries around the world.” So, does that mean Americans can't be poor? Then how the hell am I supposed to feel sorry for Fern?!
Since the film dances around questions of economic struggle, we are left with the familiar tired message of most indie movies - ~leave all your possessions behind to be fReEeE, connect with nature~. For some reason, the poor are more “close to Earth” than other people and their hardship is just part of their spiritual journey to self enlightenment. And of course, there's no threats living that lifestyle, everyone is so nice. One would think the poor fight the poor for survival, so I expected people around those parts to be dangerous but no, it seems like the nomads community is just super nice.
The movie is so superficial. For Chloé Zhao it’s totally enough to showcase what it's like to live in poverty by letting some poor people speak for a couple of minutes. She never explores why they are in these situations or the societal factors that put them there in the first place. The book Nomadland is based on is very critical of Amazon's labor practices, so it is very weird to see people defending the depiction of Amazon in the film, which is not as 'apolitical' as the movie and Chloé Zhao are acting like it is. Fern always finds jobs but we never see her spending any money and yet somehow she has not enough to fix her van. How does that make sense? Maybe it was explained later in the movie (because I didn’t finish watching it)?
This movie is a whole lot of nothing. No story, character development, action or climax. The cinematography was nice every once in a while but not Oscar-worthy in the slightest. There's a reason the term Oscar Bait exists. These types of films are incredibly successful because they are an American liberal’s dream. And Nomadland is just the typical ~artistic portrait of poverty as a beautiful struggle devoid of any real political messaging~ Hollywood movie. I really can’t understand why people are parsing the film’s lack of anger toward capitalism. The movie is very neutral. I guess it was made for the same people who were acting as if they beat fascism buy electing a president who says how “nothing would fundamentally change.” The meager crumbs Americans float as "progress".
One last thing, having Frances McDormand and David Strathairn acting among people playing fictionalised versions of themselves is jarring. I don’t understand the ‘woke police’. Had McDormand’s characters be trans, Twitter would have been on fire. So, it’s okay to pretend you’re poor but not trans? The ‘woke’ people are shockingly selective of their outrage and it’s an issue I have with this era of ‘woke activism’.
