Nomadland

The anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman noted in 1983 that nomadic people tend to behave more independently, display self-sufficiency, and emphasize autonomy. These ideas are visualized in Nomadland, the new film adapted for the screen by Chloé Zhao, especially through its main character, Fern, played by Frances McDormand, in this cyclical drama about a woman who lives out of her van, working from temporary job to temporary job. 

But Nomadland isn't simply a look at the psychology of an independent-minded nomad criss-crossing her way in a van across the American west. It's also a look at how economics can profoundly impact everyday people. Based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder about older Americans looking for seasonal work after the Great Recession, Fern is a fictional character in a real-life crisis many will recognize.   

With all that has happened in the past year, it might be easy to forget that 73,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in the United States since 2001. Even without the pandemic, things have radically changed for a significant amount of workers in this country. Despite things in large part getting better (at least before the pandemic), the nation has tolerated certain segments of the public being left behind. It's the price we apparently are willing to pay. Nomadland is a reminder of the cruelty in doing so. 

Fran was married to a man for years before his death, and they both worked in Empire, Nevada, the real-life census-designated place that now is a ghost town. With the factory closed and her job lost, Fran, with limited options, gets rid of most of her stuff and departs Empire to search for work. The first job we see Fern work in after she leaves is for Amazon in a warehouse for seasonal work. It's a bit surprising that Amazon would agree to let the production film there, but to paraphrase Wilfred Chan at Variety, Amazon is treated with kid gloves. Chan writes that "because the film is primarily a character study of [Fran], it exchanges Bruder's sharp indignation over capitalist exploitation for a muddled message about individual freedom that downplays the real stakes of gig labor." I agree. It all sometimes feels like quasi-Amazon propaganda, that they're the good guys trying to help those in need, when in fact, they often make the problem worse. 

Zhao, to her credit, deserves praise for telling stories that most Americans never hear. Her previous film, the 2017 drama The Rider, focused on Native Americans in the Badlands and also featured a non-trained acting cast. The main character in that film is a rodeo star struggling with poverty after his career is cut short due to an injury. Her screenplay adaption of Nomadland, as Chan said, avoids the more overtly political messages of its source material, but it at least feels authentic and humanist. For example, the way the story occasionally jumps forward without showing us every step of Fern's path helps the film show the vast scope of her difficult and eventful year. 

Aside from a little bit of Fern's background, not much of the others' is given, but this is not required. This film is purely about these characters' present. One important piece of information given, though, is when someone glibly defends Fran's nomadic ways as being a part of "American tradition" similar to the Pilgrims, and there's just so many mixed feelings upon hearing something like that. It's an important moment in the script. Zhao also deserves praise for offering friendly reminders of the gorgeousness of the west, especially as Fern goes to various locations, like Badlands National Park and redwoods. 

And of course, should Zhao be nominated for Best Director, it will also be due to her ability to get exceptional performances from her cast members, both from the traditional and untraditional actors. In films like Nomadland, often the non-trained actors are more interesting than the trained ones. This is particularly true of real-life nomads in the film, namely Bob Wells, Swankie, and Linda May, who play fictional versions of themselves. McDormand and especially David Strathairn (the only other professional actor in the cast), though, have made a career of often being as naturalistic as possible, so they fit in seamlessly. 

Yet this isn't to suggest that there are no issues with Nomadland. One issue is the focus on Fern's search for answers as much as for work. This is a slightly uncomfortable part of the film, almost suggesting that her struggles are due to some kind of "free spirit" and migratory disposition instead of the seismic changes to the workplace and a nation leaving behind a significant amount of its workers. Fern isn't necessarily a vagrant, proudly (sometimes stubbornly) refusing a helping hand or a warm bed and stability. "You know I'll pay you back, right?" she asks in one moment when given some money. It would be tempting to use words like "odyssey" for how Nomadland unfolds, for that would romanticize poverty, but sometimes it's just how the film feels. It shouldn't feel that way, though. It shouldn't feel like an adventure.   

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One Night in Miami

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King famously met only once. The two most iconic leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s had quite different views, with King calling for racial integration and Malcolm calling for racial separation. With previous efforts to unite and rally together having failed, the two met by chance in the halls of the Senate just for a few moments and cordially shook hands; they never met again. After Malcolm X's assassination, King wrote to Malcolm's widow, Betty, that while the two didn't always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, he "always had deep affection for Malcolm."  

One Night in Miami is about a fictional conversation in 1964 between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Sam Cook, four huge figures who in real life were actual friends. The four of them were nascent yet simultaneously at a low point. This is evident in each scene that introduces us to them: Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay, and played here by Eli Goree) nearly loses a boxing match in London (it at first appears that he lost; it's only later revealed that he actually won); Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) bombs his performance at the Copacabana in front of an all-white audience; Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is having increasing conflicts with the Nation of Islam; and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) is, despite his incredible success in the NFL, called a racial slur (quite casually) to his face.

While this long chat in Miami is (as far as we know) fictional, it seems that writer Kemp Powers (who adapted the screenplay from his award-winning 2013 play) must have imagined at least once what it would have been like if Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had in fact met behind closed doors, away from the cameras, and exchanged more than just a polite handshake. Whether or not Powers had thought of this, Cooke is the one would be the most like King; both were born in the South, were Christian, and died young. Cooke was an active member of the Civil Rights Movement, but in this film, Malcolm X believes he ought to be doing much more than singing for cold white folks. 

Many of the most dramatic moments in One Night in Miami feature a sometimes heated argument between Malcolm and Cooke, with the former urging the latter to be more involved in the struggle for Black liberation. Most people don't like being lectured to, though, and Cooke fights back. Sometimes Clay and Brown need to break them up. Sometimes the arguing goes in different directions. The fundamental and consistent debate among them, though, is about what is best for their people during a time of terrible discrimination and violence.

Powers, the co-writer and co-director of last year's Soul and the writer of a few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, was a reporter for seventeen years and used that experience to create distinct voices for characters. The playful yet tense dialogue he gives these four is theatrical, but not as much as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which might serve as a major competitor in awards season. One Night in Miami is the directorial debut of Regina King, who the past few years has picked up a variety of awards for her work in front of the camera in projects like If Beale Street Could Talk and Watchmen. For her debut, King has received rave reviews and is a contender for Best Director at the Academy Awards, which would make her the first Black woman to achieve that.

King sometimes lets some of the supporting bit players overdo it, but she gets quality work from her four leads, particularly Odom, who has dazzled audiences this year with his work here and in Hamilton. The best part of his acting in One Night in Miami is his singing; that is, unsurprisingly, his own voice singing some of Cook's famous songs. The others are commendable, as well. The British actor Ben-Adir commands attention in every scene, Goree has the haughty confidence of Clay down perfectly, and Hodge's well-played passivity serves as an appropriate balance to all the energy in the tight hotel room. The four succeed in pulling off possibly the most challenging aspect of such a project: portraying real-life figures without appearing like a cheap imitation. While the other supporting actors sometimes give distracting performances, others (like Beau Bridges) do not, and actors known primarily for their work on television shine here as well, with Lance Reddick as one of Malcolm's bodyguards and Michael Imperioli as Angelo Dundee being notable examples. 

While the ideas are fascinating to listen to and the actors do a terrific job communicating them, audiences will have to decide their eagerness for watching what essentially is a long conversation in which they will be a fly on the wall. A result is that it sometimes feels repetitious. One Night in Miami sometimes feels not like a four-way conversation between icons but instead a diatribe by one of them (Malcolm) against another (Cooke) for not doing enough to support the cause, while the two others (Clay and Brown) are trying to discover what personal path they will take. Of the four, it is Brown who likely is the audience surrogate, partly because he says the least. He calls the evening a "strange night" and asks out of exhaustion what is going on. Audiences might feel the same way he does.  

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The White Tiger

Twelve years ago, the Indian actor and director Aamir Khan described Slumdog Millionaire as not being an Indian film, but a film about India, similar to Gandhi. His criticism was milder than what other Indian critics were complaining about, with some viewing the British film as insulting or only focusing on negative aspects of life in India. 

I don't know what Khan thinks of The White Tiger, the new adaption of Aravind Adiga's novel on Netflix, but I suspect his views would be similar to how he felt about Slumdog Millionaire. It's is easy to see how The White Tiger could be another case of Hollywood poverty porn. NPR interviewed several Indians who grew up in poverty, and there are mixed reactions, with one saying that the film "catered to the white Western gaze, reinforcing stereotypes that the poor are helpless."

I am not Indian, I have never lived in India, and I have not experienced poverty; therefore, all I can do is read these concerns and allow it to affect my perception of a movie that I generally liked. Beyond that, it does seem (to an outsider, at least) that while there certainly is Western gazing in this film, director Ramin Bahrani (who also wrote the screenplay) is cognizant of complaints about Slumdog Millionaire and at least is trying hard not to repeat the same mistakes.

Part of his strategy in doing so is to focus on the politics a lot more. Instead of an earnest and sweet rags-to-riches tale that felt universal, The White Tigers tries a different approach, frequently comparing those who suffer from capitalism to chickens awaiting their violent end in a coup and casting a wide net of attacks against hypocritical politicians, the caste system, the rich, tribalism, and liberal do-gooders. 

The vehicle for such an ideological message is the main character, Balram (played by Adarsh Gourav). Balram is a clever boy, becoming the only one in his class to be fluent in English. This impresses a teacher so much that he calls him a white tiger, a very rare animal in the jungle. White tigers, though, presumably are vulnerable, as their white fur can give them away, and so, too, Belram is at risk. Balram's dreams of enjoying his scholarship and studying are crushed when is father (Satish Kumar) dies of tuberculosis and his grandmother (Kamlesh Gill) orders him to work at home at the family tea shop so that they can pay off debts to the village landlord, nicknamed The Stork (Mahesh Manjrekar). 

Balram grows up but still dreams of escaping the village and going on to bigger things. He's able to charm himself into getting a job as the driver of Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), The Stork's Western-educated and promising son. On the surface, Ashok is kind to Balram, certainly kinder toward him than The Stork or Ashok's older brother, The Mongoose (Vijay Maurya), are. Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jones, who also is an executive producer of the film), Ashok's wife who was raised in the U.S., also displays kindness toward Balram. Their generosity, however, is superficial, and when push comes to shove, a more honest reality presents itself.

It doesn't matter, though. Balram becomes infatuated with them, constantly calling Ashok "sir" and using words like "master" and "serve" to Ashok and Pinky, whom he calls members of his family. "It is my duty to serve," he says without hesitating. Eventually, though, Balram can only take so many de-humanizing insults. "Do we loathe our masters behind a façade of love, or do we love them behind a façade of loathing?" he asks, in the film's best line taken from the book. 

Gourav's performance is fantastic. He's given several moments to show what he can do physically and verbally, but his eyes do a lot of the work, too. His delivery of other well-written lines in this manifesto, like "When I looked at that cash, I didn't feel guilt; I felt rage," are spot-on. The audience is witness to Balram's metamorphosis from tea worker to driver to beyond, becoming sort of an Indian Robin Hood, fighting against modern-day India's "two-caste system" of those with bellies and those without, and Gourav's performances makes that transformation more fascinating.

Bahrani does a commendable job adapting this novel for the screen, and it is great that Western studios are diversifying their content to include more Asian stories featuring Asian performers. (It was not that long ago when actors like Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness would appear in brown face or when the only Indians in movies were those eating monkey brains.) Alas, the concerns about the West's portrayal of India continues to be problematic. The White Tiger is less awkward than films before it, but the West still has a ways to go.        

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Promising Young Woman

"That is just asking for it." This is one of the lines from the creepy predators featured throughout this film; this particular one comes right at the beginning. The predators are a few guys hanging out at a club, venting about work and on the lookout for a hookup. Soon, they see a woman who has had too much to drink. They start to express concern; they want to make sure the really drunk woman at the club is alright, but this is all part of the strategy. It's a slightly more woke, slightly more polite version of the type of sexual predator we've come to know in pop culture, both in front of the camera and behind it. These guys will make sure the woman is okay, but also okay enough to go to bed with him. "Gosh, you're so pretty," they'll say, to really drive home their courteous, falsely deferential persona. It's like they're a feminist version of a rapist, and the ultimate villain in this tale is the attitude that boys will be boys. 

2017 was the year of MeToo, but 2020 was the year of MeToo cinema. Three years after the beginning of the movement, which would bring about the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, John Lasseter, R. Kelly, Dustin Hoffman, and so many others, notable films like The Assistant, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and The Invisible Man have tackled the subject. None of those films have been quite as forceful as Promising Young Woman, the new film written and directed by Emerald Fennell, her full-length feature film debut. (She has acted in films like The Danish Girl and the Netflix show The Crown and has a cameo in this film.) One of the reasons why Promising Young Woman is important is because the inexcusable behavior of men is not always so obvious (at least to other men, that is). For example, after Weinstein's accusers finally got the attention of the world, many men surely felt relief that they themselves had never behaved like Weinstein. It wasn't until the behavior of other celebrities (like Aziz Ansari and James Franco) became known that the male population as a whole probably sat themselves down to have a self-reflection session. 

Cassie Thomas is surrounded by guys like these. She also has had to deal a lot with toxic femininity in her life, as some women in her past and present have engaged in subtle slut shaming and victim blaming. Cassie is played by Carey Mulligan in probably her best performance so far. Despite the film's title, Cassie dropped out of medical school and serves coffee at a local shop while living with her parents. But by night, she goes out to clubs, where her mission has a profound sense of purpose to end predatory behavior, as she goes from club to bar and puts on an act of being completely intoxicated, luring in seedy men before she can rain verbal justice on them.

Why is she doing this? It's best to leave that unwritten. Fennell doesn't reveal Cassie's reasons for a while, and even then only gradually. But part of Cassie's odyssey is hindered when she starts to fall for an old college classmate from medical school named Ryan (Bo Burnham), a seemingly sweet guy who is now a doctor. Cassie can't help but fall for him, and the two of them lip syncing in a pharmacy to Paris Hilton is the most joyous moment in a film that for the rest of its runtime is quite dark. Burnham, the comic who rose to fame in the early days of YouTube and who also wrote and directed Eighth Grade, provides the most complex acting of his career. Mulligan and Burnham are also supported by a great cast that includes Alison Brie, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox, Connie Britton, Sam Richardson, Max Greenfield, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Molly Shannon, and Alfred Molina. 

The color palate used in this film, with Rae Deslich's set decoration, Nancy Steiner's costume design, and Benjamin Kracun's cinematography, is exceptional and makes the film feel like a less disgusting version of Birds of Prey. And aside from the technical aspects and Mulligan's acting, Fennell's writing and directing is the best part about Promising Young Woman. Her script features a lot of admirable strategic patience, only giving a few pieces of information at its own pace. 

It's not perfect, though. For example, there are two major twists in the film. One takes place at the conclusion of the prologue, and the other basically starts the final act of the film. The first one is unexpected, and will start the journey of making things a little clearer. The second twist, while important, is also kind of predictable. Additionally, this is a black comedy, but some of the humor is unfunny at best and overly morbid at worst. There are other problematic moments as well. It seems like Cassie is able to get away with some of her actions (like smashing up a car with a tire iron) probably because she's a white woman.

That being said, Promising Young Woman certainly is a clever, more modern and sophisticated revenge flick than what we're used to seeing from Hollywood, and we should all greatly look forward to Fennell's next work. 

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