Digressions in Nomadland — Review & Commentary
Written February 2021
A REVIEW & COMMENTARY IN THREE HEARTFELT DIGRESSIONS
CONGRATULATIONS DIGRESSION
The 2021 Academy Awards won't be held for another few months, but as the Italian boys I grew up with liked to say, it don't matter for nothin', because Frances McDormand and director Chloe Zhao are shoe-ins for the Best Actress and Best Director Oscars, respectively. Both are certain to win.
The ever-earnest and steadfastly authentic McDormand, drawing charitably on her long and illustrious career, performs a symphony of acting deliciousness with her genius turn as Fern in Zhao’s gorgeously haunting new movie, Nomadland. As for Zhao, it's obvious she's a visionary director with a near perfect eye and an equally brilliant writer bound to regale us with her special form of storytelling for decades to come. I cannot wait to see what she has in store for us.
CONGRATULATIONS LADIES!
NOMADLAND’S HOLY THEATRE DIGRESSION
Peter Brooks was an unabashed genius of the modern theatre — a rebel, anti-guru, alchemist, and theatrical-royalist. In this digressionary sidebar, I wax nostalgic about Brooks' 1968 hand grenade of an essay — The Holy Theatre — in which he attempts to rediscover that lost sense of euphoric communion between theatre audiences and the actors onstage. The Holy Theatre — long considered the Holy Grail of theatre texts — is still sacred in many quarters. Over the past thirty-five years it has been just as sacred to me.
I first became acquainted with Brooks and his idea for the holy theatre in 1987 during a semester abroad in London. Despite the burdensome presence of an enduring recession, London was magical to me — the people, the culture, the European vibe, and the experience of traveling from city to city with my closest friends. Though classes were largely beside the point, I did have a particular fondness for one such class — Foundational Elements of Stage Acting & Performance — where I first learned about Brooks and the deep meaning and importance of his seminal essay. His ideas resonated so completely with me that they inspired me to create my very own portmanteau for those times I'm fortunate enough to witness a work of creative genius. I refer to these experiences as HOLY TATRO.
Brooks's Holy Theatre recognizes the stage as a place where the invisible not only appears, but also captures and maintains a deep hold on our attention, imagination, and emotions. Bearing witness to a Holy Theatre — aka Holy Tatro — performance is a rare and indeed memorable experience, invariably propelling those who witness it to a rarified place of beauty and spirit personified. Although Brooks always insisted that reality itself must be the goal, he felt strongly that “the invisible act of communication between actor and audience is surreptitiously produced out of the need to impart some emotion and an audience's collective and individual desire to be moved by one."
The purpose of this particular digression, in addition to introducing you to my Holy Tatro portmanteau, is to simply say that watching Frances McDormand as Fern in Nomadland was for me a Holy Tatro experience. As I sat alone watching Zhao’s film late at night, I felt deeply connected to the character subjects of her thorough and gorgeously crafted exploration. It was an experience I will not soon forget.
REVIEW & COMMENTARY DIGRESSION
Nomadland is both an intensely felt gut-punch and a desperately welcome embrace. To watch this film is to be enveloped at a primal level in a rare, magical, and magisterial movie-going experience. Nomadland tells the story of Fern, a woman in her sixties, who journeys through the American West after losing everything in the Great Recession. She lives and survives by any means necessary as a van-dwelling, modern-day nomad. You’ve no doubt seen news coverage of people just like Fern during the Christmas holidays. They are part of the holiday-surge workforce at companies like Amazon and FedEx. Although their story has been covered in the media for years, until Nomadland, it was a story that, in many ways, remained largely untold. These modern-day nomads are no different than you and I. They share our hopes and dreams. They strive and struggle like we do. And, just like us, they try their best to get from here to there. Perhaps the only difference between us and them is that when their luck ran out they didn't have a built-in support system or any hope for a soft landing. They didn’t have the brother or friend with a spare room, the parents with a benevolent and giving hand, or the church group with a can making its way around the room on a Tuesday evening. What they did have was wheels, and with nothing to hold them in place, they hit the road on an adventure of survival.
Nomadland is a quiet, slow, and exceedingly sparse film with a plot that remains largely out of view. The characters, many, it appears, played by real-life nomads, are mere stand-ins for your strange uncle who lives in his van and works at Amazon every November and December, your best friend’s brother who never recovered from the knee injury that ended his dream of gridiron stardom, or your distant cousin who was never quite the same after his best friend was killed in a car accident during his senior year of high school. Or, maybe even you.
At first glance Nomadland doesn’t land as thematically rich and complex, but it is. It's also beautiful, poignant, deeply real, and uncannily earnest. Writer-director Chloe Zhao does a masterful job in presenting its many complex and multi-leveled themes on a canvas quiet enough and grand enough to be able to hold them all.
Nomadland isn't a movie that tells one specific story. Rather, it tells all of them. That nothing much happens on the screen doesn’t at all distract from everything you know that’s happened away from it, an experience which constantly brought to mind for me the title of writer and journalist Ed Yong’s recent book, I Contain Multitudes.
I didn't move an inch or utter a sound from Nomadland’s opening sequence through its end credits. I was turned to stone by the film’s propulsive gut-punch, it's warm embrace, and the haunting and beautiful scenery featured in nearly every scene. But it was the silent parts that touched me most deeply. Fern standing in the foreground, a solitary figure on high, gazing out onto a gigantic and mesmerizing landscape spread out for hundreds of miles. As the camera slowly moves in on her ever earnest gaze, we're left with little choice but to feel what she feels. Does the slight glisten just beneath her large, wide open brown eyes hint at a barren loneliness or an apparition of the wide open freedom laid out before her? While there’s no way to really know, one suspects things have turned sour for the regal figure standing before us. There’s not enough emotion in the world to fill that spaciousness and yet there’s heart and pain and laughter and feeling in every pixel before you. Just remarkable. In those moments especially, it occurred to me that Zhao’s lens needed McDormand’s gaze as much as McDormand needed the vastness of America's western landscape to capture and hold her in place.
This is a film you should definitely see but be prepared to be gutted to your core. I'm honestly not sure I'll ever be the same and for that I'd like to thank both McDormand and Zhao.