Monthly Archives: October 2020

  • Nomadland

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Chloé Zhao (2020)

    Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2017, is a work of non-fiction.  Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the book is harder to define.  Nomadland, which screened at the London Film Festival after European and North American premieres at the Venice and Toronto festivals respectively, is technically a drama but its quasi-documentary aspect is more than a matter of style.  Like the real-life people in Bruder’s account, most characters in the film are Americans travelling the country to find work.  The cast members playing them actually are ‘nomads’ of this kind, not professional actors.  Zhao’s screenplay may involve them in some fictional storylines but the performers concerned, to all intents and purposes, are being themselves.  Each nomad character shares their name with the person taking the part.  Except for one – Frances McDormand is a woman called Fern, and Zhao’s version of Nomadland is chiefly her story.

    The nomads, in many cases, lost money and property in the 2008 financial crash.  They drive from state to state, in the camper vans that are now their homes, looking for seasonal jobs – in the bars and kitchens of tourist spots, crop harvests, a vast Amazon warehouse on the run-up to Christmas.  Fern and her husband, Bo, were residents of the town of Empire, Nevada, a place that economic change really has wiped from the map.  On-screen text at the start of Nomadland explains that falling demand caused US Gypsum, which owned Empire, to close its plant there in 2011.  Soon afterwards, the local ZIP code was discontinued.  While her husband worked in the Empire gypsum plant, Fern did various jobs, including supply teaching and HR admin.  Now widowed, she lives in a dilapidated van, though she’s made resourceful use of the small space and found room for a few cherished mementoes.  Zhao’s narrative follows a little over twelve months in Fern’s nomadic existence, from shortly before one Christmas to just after the next New Year but one.

    As a newcomer to this world, Fern acts as the viewer’s proxy.  Most of the first hour of Nomadland (which runs 108 minutes in total) comprises a description of an unusual way of life, introducing individuals who typify it.  Fern is assigned three mentors – Linda (Linda May), Swankie (Charlene Swankie) and Bob (Bob Wells).  Like Fern, they, and others among the travellers, are senior citizens – a reminder of the demographic of many victims of the ‘Great Recession’.  It’s natural to see these people as latter-day kin to the itinerant families in The Grapes of Wrath though some of them evidently prefer to keep on the move or are survivors of the 1960s counterculture:  Bob Wells, for example, is a longstanding nomad and stalwart anti-capitalist.  Nomadland, distinctive as a road movie through its focus on a persisting community, nevertheless reflects some standard features of the genre.  The protagonist has a series of one-off or temporary encounters.  The changing seasons and geography allow for sustained, expressive cinematography (by Joshua James Richards) of various landscapes.  (The continuity of Ludovico Einaudi’s subtly emotive music, not written originally for the film, complements these visuals effectively.)

    Frances McDormand isn’t the only acting pro in Nomadland.  David Strathairn is Dave, a fellow traveller who takes a shine to Fern.  Strathairn’s son, Tay, plays Dave’s son, James, whose unexpected appearance on the scene leads Dave to give up his peripatetic life.  There’s a cameo from Cat Clifford, who has appeared in both of Chloé Zhao’s previous features, which include the widely-praised The Rider (2017).  But McDormand is in nearly every scene and the success of the film doubly depends on her.  She has to hold it together, and the audience’s attention.  She also needs to harmonise with the non-actor cast she often shares scenes with.  It’s probably fair to say that no American actress is better equipped than McDormand to take on this challenge, and the result is entirely successful.  Regardless of the camera’s scrutiny, you never catch her doing anything phony.  Even when Fern recites from memory ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ (the whole sonnet), the result is fresh, deeply felt and not in the least actorly.  In this role, McDormand, not for the first time, illuminates apparent ordinariness, makes uncomplaining decency compelling.

    The later stages of the film, which concentrate increasingly on Fern, have a more conventional shape.   She develops a wary, low-key friendship with Dave.  His son suddenly turns up while both are working at Wall Drug in South Dakota – Dave as a chef, Fern waiting tables.  It transpires Dave is now a grandfather; a while later, he decides to move in with James, his wife and their baby.  Dave’s very keen for Fern to visit, which she does for the family’s Thanksgiving celebrations.  He clearly wants her to stay for good but he must realise, as the audience does, that’s not going to happen.  By now, Fern prefers her cold camper to the warm bedroom on offer in James’s house.  She takes her leave early one morning before anyone else has surfaced.

    When her van breaks down, she can’t afford the repair bill and visits her younger, married sister Dolly (Melissa Smith) to ask for a loan.  The meeting also yields more of Fern’s backstory, for which this viewer was by now hungry.  According to Dolly, Fern always had itchy feet when they were growing up: she left their parents’ home at the first opportunity.  She then met, wed and settled down with Bo, to spend decades in the same house in the same town.  The implication that childless Fern’s inherent wanderlust has returned since she lost her irreplaceable husband is credible.  Near the end of the film, Fern makes a melancholy pilgrimage to what used to be Empire, Nevada – a ghost town in a vividly immediate sense – and her home there.  After jettisoning further possessions, she drives off to her next destination.  The closing titles are preceded by Chloé Zhao’s dedication of the film to the people it’s about, concluding in a phrase used several times in the course of the story, ‘See you down the road’.

    Nomadland has already won the Venice Golden Lion and the Toronto audience award.  It looks set for plenty more prizes, probably including a third Best Actress Oscar for Frances McDormand.  The film is impressive both technically (Zhao herself did the fluent editing) and thematically.  It’s difficult to fault on its own terms but I must confess to finding it increasingly hard work and eventually frustrating.  While it’s good to see a film-maker well disposed towards her characters, Zhao’s liking for hers comes at the cost of their human complexity (with the qualified exception of Fern).  Zhao very reasonably sees the nomads as a group living at the margins of society whose story it’s vital to tell.  But her sympathy and admiration deprive them of flaws or mixed motives, and denude the narrative of chafe and conflict.  No one seems to have an alcohol problem or utters a word of bad language.  David Strathairn, like McDormand, integrates skilfully with the non-professional cast but I wished he’d had the chance to go beyond that.  Fern’s three mentors, and other nomads, are arresting camera subjects.  Each in turns says her or his piece but I wanted know more about them.  If this film was a genuine documentary, the director would have wanted – might well have demanded – the same.

    When Dave hastily picks up a cardboard box containing Fern’s treasured china, the bottom falls through and crockery smashes on the ground:  it’s almost a relief when Fern is briefly angry.  On the visit to her sister, she disagrees with Dolly’s husband and his friends as they talk about the housing market.  Here too, you’re grateful just that the heroine has raised her voice – though Chloé Zhao probably means us to feel, rather, that Fern has got her sense of priorities right and the men concerned haven’t.

    ‘Imagine no possessions

    I wonder if you can

    No need for greed or hunger

    A brotherhood of man’

    I’ve always found the vision of ‘Imagine’ off-putting.  The opening words, ‘Imagine there’s no heaven’, lead into description of a wanly monotonous world that calls to mind traditional complaints about heaven (sitting on a cloud playing a harp all day must be boring, etc).  As a piece of drama, Nomadland is something of a cinematic equivalent to ‘Imagine’.  Also like John Lennon’s song, it could become a classic.

    16 October 2020

  • Another Round

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Druk

    Thomas Vinterberg (2020)

    Soon after One Night in Miami at the London Film Festival came Thomas Vinterberg’s latest, which he co-wrote with his regular collaborator, Tobias Lindholm.  This is another film about four men, played by four good actors, but the similarities end there.  I hated Another Round.  As I started to write this note, I read that it had been named the Festival’s Best Film.  This year, the award was voted for by audiences – the latest, albeit a minor, instance of democracy getting a bad name[1].

    The main characters are friends and members of staff at a Danish secondary school.  Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) teaches history and Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) psychology.  Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) is in charge of games and Peter (Lars Ranthe) the school choir.  The first two have wives and children, the latter two neither.  The foursome meets in a restaurant to celebrate Nikolaj’s fortieth birthday.  All except Martin, who’s driving, are enjoying the wine; the conversation, too, turns to drink.  Nikolaj tells the others about a theory propounded by Finn Skårderud, a (real) Norwegian psychologist.  According to Skårderud (according to Nikolaj), human beings are born with a blood alcohol level that is 0.05% too low:  sustained modest alcohol consumption therefore improves human performance all round – makes you more confident, relaxed and daring.  The men decide to test the theory.  Martin joins the others in swilling wine.  It’s a declaration of intent.

    We already know things aren’t going well for Martin either at work or at home.  A student asks how Martin can expect the class to pass their forthcoming university entrance exams when their teacher’s attitude is so ‘indifferent’.  Screen moments later, the school head (Susse Wold) informs Martin that the pupils have demanded an urgent meeting.  When he arrives at it, the kids are accompanied by their parents, who also disparage Martin’s teaching.  At home, conversations with his two adolescent sons are glumly laconic.  Their mother Anika (Maria Bonnevie) no longer recognises in her husband the vital man she married.  Things aren’t good in the bedroom, even when Anika isn’t working night shifts (as a nurse?).  We see next to nothing of Nikolaj’s performance in the classroom; we do see that this vaguely pompous fellow, who means to turn the results of the alcohol experiment into an academic paper, does as he’s told by his wife.  They have three young kids, one a regular bed-wetter.  Only two scenes take place in Tommy’s home, which he shares with his elderly, ailing dog.  This animal has different urinary problems:  his master has to help him to pee.  Peter’s domestic life is conspicuous by its complete absence from the film.

    The drinking regime is soon paying dividends, especially for Martin.  His mildly inebriated lectures about great tipplers of the twentieth century – Churchill, Ernest Hemingway – go down a storm with his previously disgruntled class.  Martin takes his wife and kids away on a spur-of-the-moment camping weekend.  It’s the first family holiday they’ve had in ages; sex in the tent is great for him and for Anika.  In compensation for the negligible coverage of their lives outside work, each of Tommy and Peter is assigned a particular schoolkid and helps him to overcome his inadequacies.  The despised, bespectacled runt of a junior football team, with the help of a swig from Tommy’s bottle of ‘water’, starts scoring goals.  Sebastian (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt), an older boy, fears he’ll go to pieces in his forthcoming viva.  Peter recommends Dutch courage.

    As the principals imbibe, the screen flashes up numbers that indicate the rising blood alcohol level.  The film opens with a quote from Kierkegaard (also, eventually, the subject of Sebastian’s viva:  suitably fortified, he passes with flying colours).  Further references to Skårderud’s theories help maintain the film’s archly intelligent surface.  But Another Round depends – like any film that means to mine this subject for comedy – on the hilarity of men behaving badly when they’re sloshed.  (The hilarity includes not just legless collapse(s) but also Nikolaj, instead of his little boy, pissing in the bed.)  Until, that is, things go too far.  Martin and Anika’s second honeymoon period is short-lived: a showdown between them precedes a marital break-up.  Following a spectacularly blotto appearance at a school staff meeting, Tommy gets fired or suspended – or, at any rate, stops going to work, starts going emotionally downhill.

    The screening I attended in NFT1 included a short introduction, a recording of BFI’s Sarah Lutton in Zoom conversation with Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm.  The film’s Danish title translates simply as ‘Drinking’; Vinterberg explained that he and Lindholm originally had in mind a ‘celebration’ of alcohol but felt they also needed to suggest the price that can be paid for it.  Both joked about being middle-aged men wondering what life’s about and where it’s disappearing to, and their consequent need for alcohol relief.  Lindholm pointed out that his children and a full diary of meetings make for a very busy, stressful routine: your heart bleeds for this father of three and internationally successful film-maker.  (In addition to writing with Vinterberg, Lindholm has directed A Hijacking (2012) and A War (2015).)  To be fair to both men, their interview was an accurate predictor of the tone of the film to follow, and its blithely slapdash script.

    All four main players have appeared in Vinterberg films before but the director enjoyed one of his biggest successes with The Hunt (2012), starring Mads Mikkelsen, and Another Round is largely about Mikkelsen’s character.  As a result, Thomas Bo Larsen and Lars Ranthe, excellent actors both, are wasted in more ways than one; and Martin’s dominance in the story weakens it as an illustration of male midlife crises.   Beyond a passing suggestion that Peter can’t get a girlfriend, there’s little to explain why he and Tommy need to drown their sorrows.  Anika, when she chucks Martin out, complains that, ‘Everyone in this country drinks like maniacs’.  If she’s right (on the evidence of the film she seems to be), it’s hard to see the friends’ misguided experiment as a function of the male menopause.  It’s more a bizarre variation on a Danish national sport.

    Vinterberg’s description of the film as essentially a paean to drinking, tempered by acknowledgement that you can overdo it, is reflected in the climax to Another Round.  Tommy, on the point of euthanising his old dog, decides to take his own life, too.  It’s a thoroughly perfunctory tragedy.  There’s a funeral service, with the other men as pallbearers and ‘Specs’, the kid Tommy helped score goals, leading a graveside tribute.  Martin, Nikolaj and Peter go for a meal in memory of their pal before joining in the boozy celebrations of the graduating school class.  (No one actually says, ‘It’s what Tommy would have wanted’, but that’s the message.)  The happy endings for his mates – Anika decides she misses Martin, Peter has it off with the pottery teacher – are as mechanically unconvincing as Tommy’s death.

    The film opens as well as closes with drunken student revelry.  Several reviews of Another Round have suggested the men are trying to recapture the distant, devil-may-care innocence of youth.  In reality, aren’t those who teach teenagers for a living less likely than most to fall prey to such dopey nostalgia?  They’re certainly less well placed to ignore youngsters’ growing pains.  (It may bed different for movie directors.)  Besides, once Vinterberg has shown Martin’s class’s earnest insistence that he sets them up for good exam grades, it’s impossible to see them as carefree, let alone believe their enthusiasm for his Churchill-Hemingway diversions.  The way the school runs is ridiculous.  The head never asks Martin what happened in the meeting with his dissatisfied pupils, none of whose parents seems to have complained to her direct.  No one ever comments on the smell of drink on Martin’s breath or anyone else’s.

    The film’s few pleasures are minor and peripheral.  A montage of famous politicians of the world either drinking or appearing to be drunk (Boris Yeltsin stars) makes for a brief amusing interlude.  Peter’s choir makes a very nice sound, even if Vinterberg means the patriotic songs they sing to be ironic.  Early on, in the pivotal restaurant scene, we learn that Martin once took jazz ballet classes.  This immediately sounds like the kind of surprising detail that’s going to get a payoff, and so it does.  Mads Mikkelsen performs a solo dance in the film’s euphoric closing sequence:  you think, at least this will be worth watching but it’s oddly underwhelming.  Maybe not oddly, though.  It doesn’t help that Mikkelsen has been doing a virtual solo throughout Another Round.

    14 October 2020

    [1] It should be said that the competition was restricted to LFF offerings available online.  The handful of high-profile films that screened only in cinemas – Ammonite, Mangrove, Nomadland, One Night in Miami – were ineligible.

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