CBR readers are likely most familiar with Chloe Zhao as the director of Marvel's upcoming Eternals movie. So let's get this question out of the way first: does her new film Nomadland, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and is poised to do similarly well at the Toronto International Film Festival, give us any idea of what Eternals is going to be like?

The answer: probably not, though viewers might catch an MCU reference in one scene, and more than anything, Nomadland guarantees that any film she makes is going to be really interesting. Maybe she's somehow convinced Marvel to let her make a naturalistic non-narrative character study that just happens to star alien superheroes (seems unlikely, though that sounds amazing). Maybe she's doing the exact opposite. The point is she's one smart and unique filmmaker.

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Zhao's first films, Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, were docudrama-fiction hybrids where non-actors played versions of themselves. Nomadland is also populated by real people, but with a couple of big name actors added into the mix -- Frances McDormand as the protagonist Fern and David Straithairn as a guy who takes an interest in her. McDormand is amazing as usual, but in a way that doesn't call attention to herself. She's not going for big dramatic "Oscar moments" but instead blends in perfectly with the actual nomads revealing their life stories.

So what happens in Nomadland? Simultaneously not much and a lot. It's mainly an observational film about day-to-day life, but the lives it follows are in constant flux. These are people who've either lost or abandoned their homes to live in their vans, traveling all around the country to find work when it pops up. The film takes viewers to places of great beauty (vast deserts, redwood forests) and to places they've never seen before (the crew somehow snuck into an Amazon warehouse). The nature of this life limits any traditional sense of narrative progress, but as the movie progresses, a clear character arc emerges around Fern's motivations for living this way.

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The film takes place over the course of little over a year, from Christmastime 2011 through the start of 2013, but feels particularly relevant to the current zeitgeist. The characters in Nomadland are essentially living a dystopian existence, relying on scraps and each other's kindness to get by. In 2020, practically all Americans are experiencing the same combination of isolation, mourning and systemic failure that these nomads were already facing a long time ago. Not everyone will love Nomadland, but it'd be hard not to find some connection with it today.

Nomadland stars Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linda May and Charlene Swankie. It will stream as part of the New York Film Festival on September 26 and is currently scheduled for theatrical release on December 4.

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