New and Past Landscapes

What a congruous contradiction in terms is "Nomadland." It's a dramatic, fictional movie based on a non-fiction book. The expanses of the picture's scenic cinematography seem to demand being seen on the big screen, yet it's wide theatrical release is concurrent with its appearance on the home streaming channel Hulu. It's about hitting the open road and traveling the country when much of its audience remains quarantined at home. It's part of one of America's oldest, mythological genres, the Western, while also recalling pioneer days, but it's a "neo," realist one set in the recent, post-Great Recession era of the 21st century. The "nomads" are mostly elderly, near or in retirement age, most of their lives and much of their memories in the past, while they set out for new work, adventures and personal relationships. Home owners taking to living and moving in vans and other automobile transportation. Real people and characters, participants and observers. An economy of extracting raw materials and manufacturing turned to Amazon fulfillment centers. The great outdoors remain, though, even if they've since been charted along the way with tourist spots, restaurants, utility poles, rest stops, parking lots, storage facilities and ghost towns. Painterly and awe-inspiring and familiar as though we've already been there. Distant and intimate. Free and not. Dawn or Dusk.

I won't be surprised if this wins the Best Picture Oscar along with other honors. It also has enough and somewhat vague socio-political commentary or relevance that seems to be to the liking of professional entertainment critics and awards shows--even if in contrast to its geography, the mostly-happy campers are a rather homogeneous bunch with little to no sign of mental-health issues or dangers of the road. And she likes to work, but down with capitalism as presented by a subsidiary of Disney. With the reminder that I'm expecting a Prime delivery soon. Poverty depicted by millionaire producers, and two-time-possibly-going-on-three Academy Award winner Frances McDormand defecating in a bucket in a van. It's inside the mainstream enough to be viable, but so outside, including largely abandoning common narrative constraints in its meandering, open-road plotting, as to also be interesting.

It works even if and maybe because it doesn't always. I love that the relationship between McDormand's Fern and David Strathairn's David doesn't turn into a cliché movie romance, or that some families may become reunited and others not so much. Ditto abandoning the dog. I even like that she doesn't quit smoking and that other characters don't bother her much about it. The seeming lack of make-up and perfect hair styling. The monologues Fern listens to from reported real nomads playing some version of themselves make for some powerfully emotional scenes. And, again, to go along with Chloé Zhao's overall direction, the cinematography by Joshua James Richards is outstanding--recently, surely the best in merely recording nature, probably the most enjoyable to look at, and still up there conceptually with the daylight lighting and painterly compositions. It's the sort of road trip, manual labor and contemplative conversations that lend to rumination of various possible avenues. Big-picture topics no matter the limits of the frame and size of the screen for its vast horizons. Love and family or solitude and new acquaintances, wage slavery and job mobility, work and retirement, materialism and trash, remembering and moving on, life and death.