It’s a very tough thing for a film critic and fan to go into a film completely unaware of any opinions that the film may have garnered, positive or negative, or in this case ungodly positive. However I must say that I manage to lower my expectations and go into every film I watch with the blankest of canvases, as if I were watching it in a vacuum. All that being said however Nomadland has been one of the most Oscar tipped movies of the entire season and after watching I must say that although I agree with many of the possible nominations this film may get, I can’t exactly say that I can concur with the overwhelming amount of hype. 

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Nomadland is by no means a bad film, but it’s also in my opinion by no means an extraordinary one. It is just pretty down the line. “Pretty” being the operative word, the film’s canvas is beautiful and the core of its story is desperately intriguing and one that we haven’t seen before depicted on film, this being chiefly down to the conceit of it being an inherently modern development. We follow Frances McDormand as Fern, a nomad who travels America in her kitted out van working from job to job, after losing everything in the recession and following the death of her husband. McDormand is great as always, and in fact her excellance is the least surprising thing of this Oscar race. McDormand’s always tender truth lies at the heart of all of her performances and Fern is truly no exception to the rule, with a delicacy of emotion present at all times and a sparring level of genuine humour underlying her interactions. However we now come to my main and fundamental issue with the film, for no matter how subtly performed, well-shot (although nothing truly exceptional) and truthful the film is, it simply goes nowhere. Our characters have little to no development and our concluding moments with them are wonderfully conceived but do very little in actually moving the film to any form of passionate or meaningful conclusion. I personally have never been for the branch of film where "meaninglessness" as a theme must mean that a film is uninteresting. Chloe Zhao wrote and directed the film, with the inspiration of Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book on the newfound phenomena, and although one can clearly make the argument that Zhao has made a slice of life movie in a world that we haven’t seen before, it doesn’t mean that that film can just meander along with that as it’s only element. The film just does meander and I wonder why Zhao chose to make this a fictional narrative film, as opposed to make a documentary like Bruder's book, if she was never going to put any narrative in the thing?

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Zhao also edits the film and although I would never call the films languid pace boring, it was by no means intriguing and was frankly at points really quite dull. At every point it seems that Zhao is branding the film as a docu-drama populating it with real life nomads playing almost barley fictionalised versions of themselves, with no name changes, telling true stories of their accounts in this current world. These stories are all endlessly interesting and intriguing and so one wonders why Zhao chose to not just frame the film as a documentary. Every element she has constructed to make the film a narrative feature has only distanced her audience from the film making its decided impact. Many scenes pass with Fern passing through locations and classic American sceneries all in some apparent attempt to bring us into a world that we just don’t care about, frankly to me it felt like naval gazing padding. I don’t wish to be so negative, especially when it comes to the fact that for many this may be the best film of the year, however I personally saw nothing but thwarted potential. Even in regards to scoring, what began as a subtle and effecting score by Ludovico Einaudi swiftly became an over-bearing cliché ridden thing attempting to force emotion out of an emotionless film, not unlike drawing blood from a stone. David Strathairn appears as one of the only other main characters played by an established performer outside of the nomad community and once more we are greeted with the major talent of an acting stronghold, however his Dave character is again frankly given nothing other than an admiration for Fern that we can’t fully invest in because of the manner in which it’s portrayed. At this points fans may comment that this isn’t a film about a woman finding love again. Well if it isn’t why spend time with the character? Why create the character in the first place, with him being aforementioned one of the only two creations? The film isn’t about a woman finding love again, because whatever the film is about is surface level on one hand and unknowable in another, and frankly not worth the running time spent with it in my opinion. 

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A meandering 5/10 with a genuinely intriguing conceit that comes to nothing. Zhao’s film for me is one brimming with thwarted quality, with a great McDormand performance at the heart of it. I have in many ways fallen victim to critical acclaim and found my first supreme disappointment of the Oscar race and a film that I don’t think I will ever return to again.

P.S. McDormand doing Shakespeare in this film has got me unbearably excited for her Macbeth with Denzel Washington, under Joel Coen. And trust me I am not a Shakespeare guy, but as film Twitter was rather quick to point out – this film may very well be built from the ground up to appease film lovers; McDormand, Coen, Washington, Gleeson all in beautiful Black and white. God, I hope it’s good.

-        -  Thomas Carruthers