Nomads and Sojourners

I catch up on a couple of pictures I've been meaning to watch that are based on books about real events.

Philomena is a 2013 movie directed by Stephen Frears and co-written (as a fictionalized adaptation of a book about real events) by Steve Coogan, who performs in the picture alongside Judi Dench. I really, deeply love Coogan’s work in Hamlet 2 and The Trip series, and his standalone vignette with Alfred Molina in Coffee and Cigarettes is my favorite scene in that film. If you have some kind of a problem with Judi Dench, I don’t know what to do for you, and predictably they both perform beautifully in Philomena, which was photographed in a workmanlike but very pretty style by a cinematographer named Robbie Ryan. I mentioned a few entries ago that I thought Frears’s 1990 movie The Grifters is really bad and overrated, and looking over the other Frears films I’ve seen I can’t point to one that I think an unqualified knock-out success. I see Frears as a capable hired gun and team player who can comfortably jump around to different genres and find work where he needs it, giving him a good on-base average but few (or no) home runs compared with some who are thought of as auteurs, and I don’t blame him for the fact that the screenplay for The Grifters is unforgivably dreary and boring. Contrastingly, Coogan co-wrote Philomena by the screenwriters’ playbook, perhaps quite literally for how conventional it is, and everyone involved in the production treats the material with a combination of seriousness and bonhomie that brings it happily to life.

Coogan plays a distinguished but out-of-work English journalist named Martin enduring a career hiccup who is introduced to Dench’s eponymous character, an old Irish woman who became pregnant as a teenager fifty years earlier and was disowned by her family, indentured to a convent and forced to give her toddler son away for adoption. Martin sees an opportunity to get back in the game by helping Philomena learn the fate and whereabouts of her son and selling the story as a human interest piece. Their journey takes them to the United States, where they learn that Philomena’s son grew into a complicated, interesting, highly successful and deeply-loved man. As the two protagonists come to depend upon and respect one another, Martin harbors qualms about commercializing Philomena’s personal journey of faith and discovery, while her evolving views about the mistakes and difficulties of her life, and what remorse or shame she is or isn’t obliged to feel about them, help her to find the bravery she needs to veto Martin’s doubts and allow her story to be told. Within an inoffensively, self-approvingly conventional structure, the dichotomy between the two main characters is tailored to make it easy for a viewer to experience amusement and pathos (done simply and cheaply, but professionally enough to be effective): Martin is navigating a mid-career crossroads while Philomena is reflecting back on her life from near its end; Martin is a professed atheist and Philomena, despite the injustice done to her by individuals within the Church, is a devout Catholic; Martin is an urbane, Oxford-educated English sophisticate and Philomena, as the dialogue takes pains to underscore, is a provincial-minded Irish immigrant who has submitted to a humble lifetime of hard work. This is uncomplicated material that one can imagine Coogan co-wrote in the certainty that his considerable reserve of on-screen charisma would be more than enough to elevate it to good drama, and Dench is a master of the craft of movie acting who does more than her share of the heavy lifting in the title role. The filmmakers are a bit too pleased with themselves to rise to the level of full self-awareness, since in their paternalistic depiction of Philomena they flirt with the kind of exploitation of her character that fuels Martin’s self-conflict over scoring a scoop off of her pain and redemption. But nearly every detail is in its right place in this straightforward and very English crowd-pleaser, and the lead performances and good photography are reason enough to give it your time.

Some of the same can be said of a newer film based on another book about true events, Chloé Zhao’s 2020 picture Nomadland, about a widow played by Frances McDormand who lives in her van, partly by choice and partly by necessity, and travels around the U.S.A. working as a seasonal automaton in an Amazon warehouse and at odd jobs where she can find them. The film is set in 2011 after McDormand’s character’s small industry town of Empire, Nevada becomes a decaying, abandoned graveyard in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. (Decay. Graveyard. Empire. U.S.A. Unsubtle but functional.) Like Philomena, this one is out to tackle real-life social issues and is impeccably-cast, very well-acted and handsomely filmed. (I judge a lot of movies by the criterion of how often I want to freeze the picture and hang it on my wall, and Nomadland, with cinematography by Joshua James Richards, is the kind I found myself pausing to admire in almost every scene. It helps that a recurrent motif in the film is ancient relics of bygone eras such as dinosaurs, fossils, rocks, forests, bodies of water and other things that provide fertile tableaus for striking, haunting compositions.) Unlike Philomena, Nomadland is not out to tell you how to feel about what you’re witnessing or whose side of what issue you’re meant to be on, because the protagonist and most of the people she meets aren’t so sure themselves and seem to have lived and suffered enough to have long since given up on the mirage of easy answers to life’s hardest questions. Whether they are on the road by choice or necessity or have gone to ground at jobs or in middle-class lives, they all seem believably human as they confront their sacrifices and burdens.

Most of the characters with whom the protagonist dwells and mingles throughout the film are houseless or homeless, and they all live with a tension implicit in being self-reliant outsiders who can’t fully outrun the humanness of interdependence and need for community. McDormand and the skilled, versatile David Strathairn, playing a fellow traveler with a chaste romantic interest in McDormand’s character, are the only two famous film actors I could spot, and they have been precision-airdropped into these roles with an ideal combination of correct casting, great acting and pitch-perfect hair, makeup and costume design, allowing them to blend in perfectly with the rest of a cast largely comprising real people playing versions of themselves. This is one of those roles that are McDormand’s stock-in-trade, playing a character burdened with the knowledge that she is genuinely more intelligent, if not necessarily smarter, than everyone around her, and she carries Nomadland with a terseness and nuance that makes her character feel at once vulnerable, closed-off and relatable. The film isn’t out to take you on a journey so much as to let you experience the protagonist’s day-to-day struggles and figure out along with her what you need to know; the closest Nomadland comes to character-defining conflict is a few short scenes towards the end where she hangs out with groups of settled house-dwellers and seems to contemplate giving in to society’s pressures to succumb to a rooted existence. But she is sufficiently repelled by having an infant shoved into her arms and by looming threats of acceptance and intimacy to return to her desiccated Nevada town for a symbolic last visit which signifies her permanent commitment to van life. It doesn’t pretend to be and is not the most dramatic or satisfying ending to this realist elegy — not for the viewer and not for the protagonist.