New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
With quiet humanity, Chloe Zhao’s ‘Nomadland’ makes noise
What’s it like to be an international film festival sensation without hardly leaving your home? Like most things during the pandemic, it’s surreal.
Except for trips to the editing room, director Chloe Zhao has mostly stayed at the Ojai, California, home she shares with three chickens and two dogs, even as her film, “Nomadland,” has won raves around the globe. At the Venice Film Festival, it won the top prize, the Golden Lion. At the Toronto International Film Festival, it was hailed by many critics as the best movie of the year and a leading Oscar contender. Next week, it will play the New York Film Festival.
Yet the only in-person feedback Zhao has received was at a drive-in screening in Los Angeles put on by the otherwise canceled Telluride Film Festival. There, beneath ashen skies reddened by nearby forest fires, she took the stage, spaced 6 feet apart from her cast, while people enthusiastically honked their horns and flashed their headlights — the nearest thing possible this year to a standing ovation. “You could see the smoke from the fire in the headlights,” Zhao says. “It was like ‘Mad Max’ or something. It was a very fitting experience for the film.”
Fitting because “Nomandland” deals with solitude and community, grief and perseverance. In the film, which Searchlight Pictures will release Dec. 4, Frances McDormand stars as Fern, a 60-year-old widow living in her van. She takes to the road after her Nevada town’s very zip code is erased when the gypsum mine that employed most of its inhabitants closed.
Like Zhao’s previous films, “Nomadland” is naturalistic, rough-hewn and soulful.
But “Nomadland” has also resonated for how it speaks to the moment. The film, much of it shot at golden hour on high plains, is lyrically tender about mortality and making the most of life when you can.