Nomadland Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Nomadland Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 26, 2021

One of the most remarkable things about Nomadland is how it manages to offer both a palpable melancholy as well as what ends up being a simultaneous indictment and celebration of the so-called American Dream. Nomadland documents the travels, physical, emotional and dare I say spiritual, of an older woman named Fern (Frances McDormand, Academy Award winner for this performance), who has suffered both the death of her husband and the closing of a gypsum plant in her hometown that long kept a lot of people there, including Fern, employed. Perhaps unwillingly cut free from whatever tethers she was experiencing in the inaptly named Empire, Nevada, Fern has become an itinerant, motoring from place to place in a little ( excruciatingly little) van she has outfitted with some supposed “comforts of home”. Nomadland owes its genesis to a somewhat similarly titled nonfiction book called Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty First Century by Jessica Bruder, which detailed the almost staggering number of senior citizens who, reeling from the economic implosion called the Great Recession, simply started traveling around the country, finding seasonal or temporary employment as they went. There are literally hordes of these people out there, as the book, and later the film, amply demonstrate, and in fact the film uses a few of the “real life” nomads who were initially profiled in the book. The result is a kind of quasi-verité outing that nonetheless has an unabashed “dramatization” air about it at times, at least presentationally in the form of director Chloé Zhao’s emphasis on long, lingering shots of desert sunsets, wide open western vistas, and the barren beauty of great swaths of less inhabited nooks and crannies of the United States.

Nomadland is, despite the film's use of gas guzzling vehicles, a hybrid of sorts, and as a result, some may be bothered by both its narrative structure as well as some of its presentational aspects. The film is in essence very much a "road movie", with Fern stopping and staying here and there, meeting people, having brief, vignette like, interchanges with them, and then moving on. As such, the through line may be more like a winding country lane than a thoroughfare, and even relatively traditional touches like a maybe, maybe not nascent romance between Fern and a "fellow traveler" named Dave (David Straitharn) is not overly developed and ends up only adding to the melancholic, elegiac ambience of the story rather than leading to any kind of happily ever after.

The scenes with the "real life" nomads that Zhao assembled for the film may also strike some as overly pretentious, even if they're "played" in a deliberately low key, anecdotal style for the most part. If there's just the slightest whiff of artificiality in some of these scenes, there's also an underlying truth that is perhaps unavoidably revealed, with a rather interesting if ironic sense of both camaraderie and isolation tending to be a dual foundational element in many of the relationships.

Presentationally, Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards emphasize the glorious if often desolate beauty of the landscapes Fern passes through, and the film almost becomes a travelogue of sorts, with quiet, verité infused scenes playing out in wide open vistas, with backgrounds frequently featuring things like "magic hour" sunsets unspooling behind the performers. While there may therefore be a kind of disconnect between the characters and their environments, that in and of itself tends to point out one of the film's central tenets, namely that, despite the hardships many of these members of what Amazon calls "Camper Force" (i.e., itinerant seasonal workers who travel from place to place), they're communing with nature in their own way, having shorn themselves of traditional "protections" like having four walls surrounding them and a roof over their heads.

I'm not entirely sure that hindsight will be completely kind to Nomadland, since it can seem too self aware for its own good at times. That said, this is a film that kind of perfectly captures a certain zeitgeist, one that is suffused with uncertainty, sadness and regret, but also hope and resilience. McDormand gives an entirely restrained performance, and in fact a lot of her scenes are reactive in nature. Nevertheless, there are veritable acres of subtext in her work, and she makes Fern a fully alive character, even if Zhao's screenplay doesn't always completely support McDormand's efforts.

Nomadland Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Nomadland is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Studios and Disney / Buena Vista with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. The IMDb lists various Arri Alexa cameras and a 2K DI as relevant datapoints. I've been on record repeatedly stating how I tend to prefer capture by Red cameras when low light conditions predominate, since my personal perception is Arri cameras can have what I've termed "digital murk" in such moments, but I have to say the overall appearance of this transfer is really rather evocative, even if shadow definition in the many dimly lit moments isn't always optimal. The repeated "magic hour" sequences really resonate beautifully, with impressive depth of field and consistent detail levels even in some very wide open framings. The palette is natural looking throughout, and there's a refreshing lack of any grading "bells and whistles", though, that said, there's an undeniably burnished look to a lot of the outdoor material. Close-ups reveal appealing fine detail levels in the well worn faces of many of the seniors inhabiting the story.

Nomadland Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Nomadland features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that is often subtle in its immersive qualities, but which does provide good engagement of the surround channels throughout, though not necessarily in any "over the top" way. The glut of outdoor material offers good opportunities for ambient environmental effects dotting the side and rear channels, though, again, these can be almost subliminal at times. More "showy" in a way are some of the scenes in an Amazon fulfilment facility, where the clamor of all the machinery and bustling workers provides more obvious surround activity. A plaintive score by Ludovico Einaudi also provides a nice bed of sound for several scenes. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout the presentation. Optional subtitles in a variety of languages are available.

Nomadland Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Forgotten America (HD; 13:35) gives some background on the project while giving an overview of the whole nomadic culture. This includes some interviews with Zhao and original book author Jessica Bruder.


• Telluride Q & A with Frances McDormand and Chloé Zhao (HD; 14:48) stems from the drive-in premiere held in September of 2020.


• Deleted Scenes (HD; 2:54)

Nomadland Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This review is going live in the wake of one of the oddest Academy Award broadcasts in recent memory (and maybe beyond recent memory). It seemed to be a foregone conclusion that the film would win Best Picture and Best Director, though some seemed to be caught by surprise by McDormand's win in the Best Actress category. One actual surprise may be that Joshua James Richards' rather gorgeous cinematography lost to Mank, though the good news is Richards' beautiful work is nicely memorialized in this Blu-ray presentation. It will be interesting to revisit Nomadland in a few years with the benefit of distance and/or hindsight, to see if it continues to resonate as strongly as it seems to be currently. This is a fascinating film from any number of angles, and if it doesn't always completely succeed, it's a noble effort, even if it may actually kind of sugarcoat what some seniors have had to endure in their so-called "golden years". Technical merits are solid, and Nomadland comes Recommended.