#nomadland

Nomadland (2021)

Oggi la festa non è in piazza, è lungo le highway. Non celebriamo la stabilità del passato, ma il coraggio di chi resta in piedi quando le certezze crollano. Leggere Jessica Bruder in Nomadland è come ascoltare un album di Bruce Springsteen che prende vita, ma senza la gloria del finale cinematografico. È la storia dei nuovi nomadi, lavoratori non più giovanissimi che, dopo la crisi, hanno…

I honestly don't have anything that profound to say about the movie because the message that immortality through art can be achieved came through quite clearly to me and I don't think I can add anything to it. I think Hamnet and Nomadland really understand that liminal space if being so hollowed out by grief (or loss, or misfortune) makes you unable to fit into the normal life that people expect of you, and sometimes making that loss concrete doesn't take it away, but makes it something that seems worth surviving. Both movies are about sentimental feelings felt by unassuming, unglamorous people, even if one of them is married to Shakespeare.

I think that's why film bros have a hard time with Hamnet and turned so viciously against Zhao and Jessie Buckley, because they don't like genuine emotion or people who live "small" lives. So many people said over the past few weeks that Hamnet was a movie for simpletons or plebeians, not true art connoisseurs like themselves. Yet how many times have they slobbered over yet another movie about a bored, affluent housewife or an unhappy yet privileged mother? I am so fucking sick of these oppressed housewife movies that come out every five minutes. That's boring to me. Critics prefers their characters cynical, broken, and privileged. They don't seem to fathom someone who was broken by circumstance instead.

This leads me to my next point, which is that I do think it infantilizes Chloe Zhao to say if she does a certain kind of movie well she's going to do everything well. I don't think it's respecting her as an autonomous human being and an artist in her own right to say that she isn't a good fit for Buffy (although that script was terrible and I don't think there's much she could have done to save it) or for Marvel. Eternals largely failed as a story because we were dealing with a cast of characters who were literally robots. There wasn't room to really understand their connection to humanity because the story was too large and they were too disconnected from it. It's also become quite obvious that the story she was trying to tell didn't fit in well with overall Marvel canon....because Marvel keeps trying to resurrect Ikaris (the literal villain who wanted to blow up the Earth) as a bland white bread superhero in various AUs (there are rumors they want him in Secret Wars ...and dear Gawd no, who is asking for this?). It wasn't as bad as people said it was but several years out I think one can objectively say "no, that didn't work."

At any rate, while I don't think the Buffy fiasco is Zhao's fault, she probably didn't improve that mess of a script and it does a disservice to claim that there's no way it could be disappointing if she was involved. I also am not sure why people are so anxious for a story mostly about a character who isn't Buffy and likely can't continue that story in any meaningful way. Go back to the drawing board and give us a story where we can actually drop in on Buffy, Willow, Spike, & co instead of something that is barely related to the source material.