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Nomadland Review

Halfway through Nomadland, a sentimental dinner plate accidentally breaks. The plate is a family keepsake that Fern (Frances McDormand) stores lovingly in her van and home after the death of her husband and the closing of her entire town. In a different movie, the plate breaking would have pushed our hero over the edge, a literal breaking point that spiraled her into an emotional outburst of anguish and sorrow. Instead, Fern keeps herself composed. She sweeps the shards up off the ground. She glues the plate back together. She keeps on moving.

Nomadland is the story of a woman dealing with severe loss as she travels from one nomad community to the next, working whatever seasonal job she can find to make ends meet. Grief is well-trodden material in fiction, but rarely is fictional suffering treated with such a non-fictional eye. Nomadland blends real people with professional actors in its depiction of van dwellers, their jobs, their communities, and their pain. Director Chloé Zhao lets the amateur actors talk while Fern (and the audience) listens and learns. Nomads discuss their struggles with PTSD, suicidal depression, and terminal cancer. Fern makes friendships, endures hardships, and keeps chugging along from one RV park to the next. 

David Strathairn plays Dave, the film’s only other professional actor. Dave is a fellow nomad who makes it increasingly known that he fancies Fern, despite Fern’s persistence to keep him a van’s length away from intimacy. Dave shouldn’t take it personally, he’s kind and caring, but Fern has dedicated herself to keeping the torch of her former life lit with the combustion generated by pushing her van’s pedal to the floor. Dave eventually learns he will become a grandfather and decides to set anchor to be closer to his family. In doing so, Fern realizes she has a choice to make: build a new life with Dave or continue to tow her heavy past. 

The variance in acting styles works exceptionally well. By letting the amateur actors tell and the professional actors show, everyone is playing to their strengths. Fern’s friendship with a few female nomads in the film feel so genuine that at times I wondered  if McDormand was even acting or just hanging out with a buddy. I also appreciated the restraint in her role coming off a much showier performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri. McDormand delivers the goods with her face alone, and the room she gives the real-life nomads to tell their stories gives the film an absorbing authenticity.

Visually, Nomadland is stunning. Zhao often keeps the camera moving in kinetic ways, with expansive zooms and pans that showcase the beauty of our country. There's poetry in the way she films loud, epic landscapes while the people moving through them are stoic and quiet. Nomadland is sparse on social commentary, which is surprising given that it depicts a real town that disappeared when a sheetrock company closed its doors after the recession. The film doesn’t want to start a conversation as much as present things as they are. All people and all towns eventually become ghosts. Few of us can spare any time to complain about bad luck, bad health, or the injustices we encounter, we keep living, even if that means sleeping in our cars and cleaning bathrooms. Nomadland isn’t pessimistic as much as it is realistic, and in a year where a global pandemic has left many of us close to falling apart, there’s beauty in a film about real people finding ways to glue themselves together.

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We’ve given ourselves a chance

Every Hilary voter in 2016 has their own horror story about election night. Around 6 pm I became worried. Around 9 pm I saw the writing on the wall. I went to bed literally shaking and shivering. I knew what had just happened was catastrophic. I felt it in my bones. I had pockets of bad sleep, awakening each time a world that felt more terrible by the minute.  The day before the first 2020 debate, I could feel my heart sinking. There was no more avoiding that we were just a few weeks away from another potential devastating blow to our country and humanity, with no guarantee that we would be better this time. Honestly, I’ve limped through the last 6 weeks because of that sinking feeling, barely keeping things together on the inside.  Tuesday night was so chaotic with each state processing vote types at different times. Experts tried to tell us when and where to expect certain results, but in the fury of the moment, even the experts forgot, and a second cataclysmic storm seemed poised to destroy everyone who managed to refortify their heart after having it stomped on four years ago.  I stayed up all night Tuesday into Wednesday morning. When hope started to surface, I needed to see it through. I was also afraid of going to sleep and having to look at my phone and see if it was over. If it was going to happen again, I wanted the pain in small increments rather than an instant knockout. As things became more hopeful, I followed more and more data folks on twitter, each expressing mathematical optimism that while things would be close, they would rather be Biden than Trump. I could breath again. And three days later, here we are.  One of the unfortunate parts of being emotionally shattered is that when you rebuild, you have to harden yourself to try and prevent breaking the same way again. The added defense has a price, it means you can’t enjoy things as much when they go your way. You have to dedicate resources to numb yourself. The highs can never feel as high again. Despite celebrations out in the street, I know there are lots of us who feel like this today who wish we could feel the full relief, the full joy, and the full hope that we would have felt four years ago had things gone the way we all thought they would. But we can’t. We are happy but stoic, relieved but also exhausted.  Four years ago we awoke to a suddenly exposed world, with its cruelty and lack of justice, long hidden from many of us, now on full display each morning, each afternoon, and each night. We still live in that same world, as rotten and broken as ever, but we know now there are just enough of us who want to fix it. Who want to nurture it to health. There are just enough of us who can stop things from slipping from being simply terrible to universally evil. When pressed against a wall, we, at least temporarily, have formed a coalition just large enough to prevent the worst parts of our humanity from dominating the course of our collective future. We’ve given ourselves a chance. And that’s worth celebrating. 

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I Think You Should Leave (best of 2019)

There’s a sketch in the first episode of I Think You Should Leave called “Baby of the Year”.  Three babies are vying for a pageant award in front of an audience, one of who, without explanation (as if any logical explanation could exist), is apparently some sort of obvious villain like the kind you’d find at a WWE match. His name is Bart Harley Jarvis, he’s dressed up like a motorcycle rider, and when his name is announced the crowd showers him with boos and chants of “Fuck you!” with the kind of venom you’d expect directed at a serial rapist, not a helpless 6-month-old. Moments later, an audience member takes the condemnation even further, as he loudly interjects, “I hope you fucking die, Harley Jarvis.” The juxtaposition of the outlandishness of such a statement being lobbed at a baby and the very matter-of-fact line-reading itself caused me to laugh so hard that I missed the next 30 seconds of the sketch. In that exact moment, I realized I was watching something uniquely hilarious. Everything I had seen in the previous six minutes of the show was funny, some of it very funny, but this was “scramble-for-the-remote-so-you-can-rewind-and-re-watch” funny and “immediately-text-your-comedy-nerd-friends-and-make-sure-they-watch-this-show” funny. It was surreal, outrageous, and just goddamn hilarious. The rest of the five and a half episodes more than lived up to that moment, and after 5+ viewings, I can say that ITYSL is the funniest thing I saw all year. 

ITYSL also made me aware of Tim Robinson’s episode of Netflix’ The Characters, which is basically a backdoor pilot for ITYSL and if I had watched it when it came out in 2016 it would have been on my 2016 list. It’s perfect. He’s perfect. 

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My 14 Favorite Songs of 2014

Tennis - Bad Girls Real - Estate Crime Owen Pallet - The Riverbed The War on Drugs - Ocean Between the Waves Beck - Blue Moon Wye Oak - Glory Strand Of Oaks - Shut In First Aid Kit - Cedar Lane Caribou - Silver St Vincent - Regret Tune Yards - Water Fountain Alt J - Hunger of the Pine Antlers - Hotel Real Estate - Horizon 

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Tainted gingerbread from old, stale gingerbread houses?

Spaghetti?

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This makes me smile

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Spending one weekend a year with these people has become the Christmas of my adulthood. There's nothing I look forward to all year long more than hanging out and laughing with these guys. All we do is talk, play games and drink in beautiful locales, and yet there's magic in it. 

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Pie chart of on-screen coffee sips for each Twin Peaks character, to go with our supercut of all the pie and coffee in Twin Peaks.

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Friend: Are you a boob or a butt guy?

Me: I'm more of a they acknowledge my existence guy.

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Twitter: we have fun over there!

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This whole scene was perfect! 

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Where do they go

Where do they go? The daily pieces that make up a life. Do they leave us all at the end Or do we toss some out throughout our stay - chucking bits of existence like balled-up paper into a bin. When we see it all flash, do we see the mundane as well? Not just a tour of past lovers, but a gala of all the floors we've swept? All our graduations, but also every morning test? How can we accumulate for decades and then in an instant unload every last bit? I can comprehend death in the moment, but not in the aggregate.

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A comic! Hooray! The chubby version of Josh probably wouldn’t be as welcome on that giant Piano.

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Goodbye Jaime

My friend Jaime died today. I wrote a post about her a couple days ago, but I just noticed a large chunk of it was missing, so I deleted the whole thing. To sum up: she was a great person with an old soul. She experienced a lot of pain by the time we started dating - she was 26, I was 22 - and I was basically a teenager. I was another dumb boy in her life who wasn't going to commit to a relationship with her. She kept me around anyway, for some reason, and was nice and kind to me in many ways. We broke off contact when I started dating Emilie, but through facebook I followed her life. I was so happy to hear she was getting married a few years ago, and elated when she was pregnant because I knew it was something she really wanted.

We never had romantic love, but I learned a lot about women from the time I spent with her. I would not have eventually been a good boyfriend without the experiences I had with her, and although I was far, far from a perfect boyfriend, I wouldn't have been a train wreck without things I learned dating her.

We caught up about once a year. She always had good advice for me and I was always happy to talk to her. On Dec 1st she told me she had cancer, and that the prognosis was grim. We talked for about an hour. She had planned to hold a get-together with friends before the end, but there wasn't enough time.

 I wish I could have called or seen her one more time, to tell her I was proud of her. I wished her good luck before her first chemotherapy treatment. That was the last I saw her online. Her husband kept all her friends aware of her status. Last week he notified everyone it was time to say goodbye and today she died. I'll miss her. I will keep her daughter and husband in my thoughts for a long time. She deserved more time, but she made the most of what I had. She was a brave woman. I hope you're peaceful wherever you are pal. Thanks for being a friend.