Nomadland immediately establishes itself as one of the great contemporary slice of life works. Director Chloe Zhao’s camera captures plenty of stunning golden hour skies, but Zhao’s perspective is focused on the faces involved instead of the world that surrounds them.
Nomadland is hardly a film about the life that these people live, instead it's about the people who live this life. It combines the most penetrating elements of the situation study and the character study to create a movie that feels entirely new, as if it makes up its own genre.
Frances McDormand gives the year’s best performance as Fern, a nomad who finds herself at the center of nearly every scene of the film. Her character is both trapped and content, with small smiles or a glint of worry in her eyes bringing life to Zhao’s script. The heartbreak in McDormand’s eyes when her friend admits she has months to live is uniquely devastating.
Zhao contemplates every step McDormand takes in some of the film’s best scenes, such as when the stationary camera captures her gleefully prance throughout a newly discovered valley. Moments like these idealize the best parts of the nomadic lifestyle, where the viewer feels as one with nature as Fern does.
But Zhao is also confident in portraying the nomads at moments where they may feel more melancholic about the events that led to their situation. The advent of mass-commercialism permeates the film through Zhao’s visual metaphors.
One of her most powerful compositions shows Fern isolated in front of the looming sign of a movie theater playing just one film: The Avengers. It is the simple human rendered totally alone by the looming presence of multi-million dollar, unfulfilling entertainment. A blockbuster movie is treated as the direct opposite to staring at a sunset. In this moment more than any other — a nomad is like the meandering ghost of days past.
It’s these cinematic statements that make Zhao’s film less an ethnographic exercise than a rich, vital story of people stripped down to their most human. Nomadland is the film of the year.
A Note on this post, and others like it: These “Capsule Reviews” are my way to write small 250–500 word reviews of individual films that don’t have questions on Quora requesting them. They will also help me work on my concision as a writer, which I desperately need to do. I’ll write them whenever the urge strikes me.
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