Nomadland may be one of the year's most critically acclaimed indies, but it's not immune to the far-reaching grasp of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Chloe Zhao's wondrous and melancholic awards frontrunner features its own shoutout to the MCU when star s McDormand wanders past a single-screen movie theater in an unnamed American town showing a major MCU release.
While details on and a recently-more-muscular Kumail Nanjiani.
Zhao was tapped by Marvel in 2018 after the success of her film The Rider, a slow-burn drama about an injured cowboy looking for purpose. It's not the first time an up-and-coming indie darling has been scooped by the studio; Thor Ragnarok's Taika Waititi and Black Panther's Ryan Coogler have come before. But neither of them managed what Zhao has accomplished, shooting an entire other film while prepping to take on the biggest studio franchise in the world. And perhaps as a nod to her forthcoming acceptance into the MCU, the cinema marquee shown features the title of The Avengers with Fern walking past and staring at the poster.
The marquee reference could be perceived as a dig; Fern is a working-class woman pushed out of her hometown, and here she is dwarfed by the film that birthed the cinematic universe, ensuring superheroes dominated the box office for the next decade and widening the gap between independent and tentpole filmmaking until mid-budget studio fare became virtually extinct. But writer-director-editor Zhao is a self-professed Marvel fan. And, crucially, The Eternals. So unless she's being slyly subversive, chances are this moment is actually somewhat of a thesis statement for her: there's room in this world for both a superhero flick and Nomadland; in fact, they can come from the same filmmaker.
The shadow of that colossal mega-hit contrasts wildly with the world and atmosphere of Nomadland, which eschews gravity-defying heroes in floating cities for lost souls in sparse landscapes. McDormand's character, Fern, has lost her husband and been displaced from her hometown of Empire, Nevada, after the closure of its sheetrock factory. With nothing else to lose, she hits the road in her van, embarking on a journey through the American West that brings her in with other wanderers who have embraced the nomadic lifestyle after the recession of 2007-2008. Fern's multi-year odyssey begins in 2011, which puts her on a direct path to come face-to-face with the highest-grossing film of 2012, The Avengers.
Whatever the results, with Disney owning Marvel and acquiring Searchlight Pictures, the distributors of Nomadland, Zhao looks likely to be giving the Mouse House a pretty stellar 2021, with a potential Best Picture win in April and the (currently-slated) release of The Eternals in November. Such superhuman feats link Zhao as much with Iron Man as they do with the restless spirit of McDormand's Fern, who hits the road and forges her own path even as she eyes up that Avengers marquee.
