I Watched Nomadland - so you didn't have to

Nomadland has now won the Critics Choice and the Golden Globe for Best Movie and Best Movie Drama (respectively). Lynn and I watched it right before the Golden Globes. 

MacDormand, quietly introspective... again

It has an amazing performance by Frances McDormand, but that isn't a surprise, she is always very good and sometimes (like in this) transplendent. It is also introspective and lyrical, which is a super fancy way of saying slow as syrup from the fridge. It's 2 hours race by like a year of the pandemic.

And, in addition to being slow, it surprises your expectations by having not too much happen. And that not much happens, then happens-ish more than once, this time without emotion.

The story is rather simple, Mcdormand loses her husband, then home, and finally her city in quick order. She has a van which she works to convert to a home. Here we can go cinema speak or English.

Cinema speak With her home on wheels she joins a rag-tag and ever changing group of Americans who hit the road and find camaraderie amongst each other.  She must work through what she wants in this new life on the road. One without guardrails.

English: She works some odd jobs, hangs around with odd characters in makeshift RV parks as she tries to adjust to life without rules she expects. Some friends are nice, some are surely and many seem delusional.  All seem to be reactive, that is rarely making changes but instead simply responding to circumstances - which isn't super engaging. Her "emotional journey", such as it is, finds her becoming less and less personable and friendly and more and more independent and remote. 

It isn't depressing as much as a long slog to isolation by choice. She is more independent at the end, but less happy.

Nomadland is like a fantastic Documentary about what the slowly (s u p e r  s l o w l y) crumbling American dream does to some people. But it is a prestige movie with a capital P - designed more for admiration than mere entertainment or (god forbid) enjoyment.

At the end, Lynn and I turned rather apologetically to each other and were quiet for a moment. We both made fairly ambiguous comments before admitting we didn't like it. Since I also saw Forrest Gump with Lynn (which we hated together as well), we both knew what that pause and question meant. And we laughed.