Boy, it’s amazing how different people can be! I didn’t see anything dreary about “Nomadland” at all. Sure, most of the characters are living on fumes financially. Some shit happens, yes. The main character herself has experienced tremendous loss, and she comes across people who are at the end of their time on earth. So what? That’s life. Fern also comes across critters and rocks and clear water and wide vistas, camaraderie and genuineness and compassion. Things many people don’t see in a lifetime. Life is not black or white. I know a lot of people go to the movies to escape the grey area, and that’s valid. It’s why Disney princesses are so popular. But the truth is that the mundane reality of life and death has poetry to it, and this movie captures that really, really well. I prefer that poetry myself.
I'm currently stuck in the alternate universe of suburbia taking care of an elderly woman who is terrified and slowly losing pieces of herself with nothing to hold on to but a television schedule that puts Family Feud in front of her five times a day, so I already know that life contains sadness, and I’m handling it, because that’s what humans do for each other. But if I could take my mother back to the world I love, and show her a buffalo lumbering along beside the road, a tree bigger the anything she’s ever seen, or waves slapping against a towering shoreline, both she and I would be able to do so much more than handle it. I can’t think of a more joyful universe to be sad in.
