Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland” making waves
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 Fox Searchlight 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.
Tired of the disappointments of more conventional and materialistic life, Fern meanders the American West while taking odd jobs ( including a stint at an Amazon fulfillment center in South Dakota) and meeting fellow wanderers. The film comes from Jessica Bruder’s book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century,” and many of the drifters encountered by Fern are the real people from Bruder’s pages or those Zhao met along the way. “Nomadland” is a portrait of modern- day independence on the American frontier.
“America is as diverse as its landscape,” Zhao said in an interview by Zoom. “One thing nice to see is just how much a conversation about how to poop in a bucket can bring together people from all walks of life. If you’re going to have a discussion about how a human being can use a bathroom in a van, none of that stuff matters.”
“There is a way for us to connect,” she continued. “Making the film gave me that hope. I know it’s tough these days, but I have that hope.”
Like Zhao’s previous films, “Nomadland” is naturalistic, rough- hewn and soulful. Her acclaimed 2018 breakout, “The Rider,” about a Lakota cowboy, was made with nonprofessional actors on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. “Nomadland” is a modest increase in scale for Zhao, introducing Hollywood stars into her Western neo- realism. But a much bigger leap is coming; she’s currently in post- production on “The Eternals,” a $ 200 million Marvel movie scheduled for release in February.