Three thoughts about NOMADLAND

 Three thoughts about NOMADLAND....

* This would be a great double bill with WILD, the Reese Witherspoon movie from a few years back. That featured a young woman moving through the wilderness, dealing with her demons and encountering similar adventurous souls. This movie features an older woman moving through America's vistas, doing much the same. 

* I'm trying to think of another recent movie that deals so much with the act of work. Frances McDormand's character, Fern, holds a series of seasonal jobs -- Amazon warehouse worker, camp host, Wall Drug cook, beet harvester -- portrayed in nonjudgmental fashion. (Controversially so, in the case of Amazon.) In so much of popular entertainment, work is the setting for other adventures, not the story itself. SUPERSTORE might've been a recent exception. Fern does this because she has to -- early retirement won't provide the benefits she needs to live -- but also, it's clear, because she wants to. She literally cleans up shit, but you're never under the impression that the work is beneath her or that she's degraded by it. It says something about the cliches of storytelling that I kept expecting an evil boss moment, but never got one.

* But mostly, this movie sits with death, or the prospect of it. The people we meet in this movie are mostly "nomads," living in their vehicles and moving from job to job, place to place. They live with the cycles of life more intimately than those of us living in the suburbs and cities, receiving the Amazon packages that Fern and her friends pack up. Fern is living with the memory of her dead husband. Another character dies, but not dramatically or unexpectedly: It's just part of having lived a long life. We're here and then we aren't. In that sense, we're all nomads.

* Bonus thought: It's fitting that this movie sits alongside SOUND OF METAL during this awards season. Both flicks move through something that looks a lot more like the real world than what most big-budget cinema, neither has any real villains to speak of, and both feature affecting, naturalistic performances by supporting characters. They are movies made for adults.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why John Brascia is the secret hero of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas."

Image
Just finished the annual family viewing of "White Christmas." So good. And the movie's secret weapon? John Brascia. Who's that? This guy dancing with Vera-Ellen: Here's my theory: John Brascia's role in this movie makes no sense at all. Danny Kaye is Vera-Ellen's love interest in the movie. He should be, by the usual logic of Hollywood storytelling, her duet partner in all her big dances. Indeed, Kaye and Vera-Ellen have a lovely dance early in the movie: After that, though, it's Brascia — who utters no lines in the movie  (see the comments below) — who is the main dance partner. It's aided by the show-within-a-show conceit of the movie: They're practicing for an upcoming musical, you see. But again, this doesn't make a whole lotta sense... ...unless you consider this possibility: Brascia, and not Kaye, was the only dancer on set who could keep up with Vera-Ellen. Yes, Kaye was enormously gifted as a dancer. But he was alrea
Read more

So I hate my fucking colostomy

Warning: This is really gross. When the doctors came to me that Saturday afternoon and told me I was probably going to need surgery, I got weepy. It wasn't the surgery itself that brought tears to my eyes—though knowing that my belly was about to be sliced open wasn't exactly comforting—but what the docs told me was waiting on the other side: a colostomy bag. Surgery scared me. The colostomy offended me. There was my vanity, first off all. Who gets colostomies after all? Old guys, that's who, grampas who've had their sexual day in the sun and don't have to worry about looking good and being attractive to the opposite sex. (I'm married and faithful, but I don't want to be repulsive to other women; this made me feel like I'd be repulsive to both my wife and other women.) Young, virile men don't have colostomies. I'm not young exactly—I'm 38—but I suspected the surgery was a too-early arrival in the precincts of the elderly. Beyond that
Read more

Mr. Mom Chronicles: Working At Home

Image
I'm in the middle of typing out an e-mail to a source on a story when my two-year-old boy climbs up into my lap with a book, "Put Me in the Zoo." "Booky?" he asks. This is slightly annoying -- I've got work to do . But the boy is part of my work, too. If I'm going to be a stay-at-home-dad-slash-freelance-writer, then I can't neglect the dad part of the equation. Even if doing so would make the writing part of that equation much easier. So I read the book. Tobias climbs down, retrieves another tome and brings it to me. "Booky?" "No, son. I've read you one, and I've got to get this done. Can you read it to yourself?" Tobias doesn't like the idea. He raises the book high over his head, then slams it down to the ground. Then he toddles off. We're one week into this experiment -- ok, we're a week into my new way of living life -- and it's clear that this is the battle I'm going to have to fight e
Read more