The Rider (2017, Chloé Zhao)

The Rider is a harrowing experience. The film establishes its stakes from the second or third scene; rodeo cowboy Brady Jandreau is recovering from a head injury. His horse threw him and stomped on his head, requiring a metal plate. He can never ride again, except his entire life has been about being a cowboy. He tells everyone he’s just taking time off to recover and will be back at it. The head injury has affected his motor control, so he can no longer rely on his hand.

The film opens with Brady taking off his bandage so he can shower—all of the principals have the same surname (to be discussed shortly), so I’m going with first names for simplicity’s sake. We then meet his father, played by Brady Jandreau’s father, Tim Jandreau (see), who’s wondering why Brady has checked himself out of the hospital early.

They live in rural South Dakota, along with Brady’s younger sister, Lilly (played by, you guessed it, Lilly Jandreau); we’ll soon find out Brady’s got no high school, no GED, nothing but years of experiencing training and riding horses. His friends are all rodeo cowboys, including best friend Lane Scott (played by Lane Scott), who had an undefined accident and is now disabled, with minimal motor skills. Brady visits him, and the two still bond over riding.

Brady’s other friends—particularly Tanner Landreau—bully him about getting back on the literal saddle. Writer and director Zhao arranges the entire film as a detached examination of toxic masculinity. But, at the end of the day, Brady needs to earn a living (dad Tim is unreliable with money, thanks to booze, gambling, and ladies), and all he knows is riding.

There are numerous discussions of Brady’s stubbornness (a trait he shares with his deceased mom); the viewer gets to see not just the inflexibility but the profound fear behind it. Brady’s fully aware of his possible fate—the film introduces Lane in conversation before the first visit—he knows all the risks and is determined to ignore them.

Just being around a horse is irresponsible and all Brady wants to do is be around horses. The film’s got some fantastic musing on riding, not just from Brady but also his friends. When they talk about it, there’s always the tragic longing for the escape those moments bring. So every scene where he’s around an untethered horse it’s a suspense sequence. Nail-biting, fist-clenching suspense. Regardless of skill—there’s a great training sequence where Brady’s got a spotter, so he’s not in the same kind of danger, and the horse training is an exceptional watch—he can’t trust his body; the viewer knows he can’t be trusted to consciously make the right decision either.

Brady knowing both those things about himself just adds further layers to the film.

The film’s semi-autobiographical (Brady and family have a different last name in the film), so Zhao is directing a cast of amateurs playing variations on themselves. And she gets incredible performances from all of them. The film’s very much the studying half of “character study,” inspecting how Brady reacts to various situations and how those reactions compound to influence his decisions.

And even though Zhao keeps the focus tight on Brady, she shows how people are seeing him, usually friend Cat Clifford. Clifford’s got a more soulful look at rodeo cowboy life than Brady’s other friends and tries to support Brady even when he’s making bad decisions (and give him the opportunity to amend those bad decisions). It’s an excellent arc for Clifford, who gives the film’s second-best performance after Brady.

All of the acting is at least good, often better. Zhao does a spectacular job with the performances. Alex O’Flinn’s cutting probably helps, but there are often long takes where The Rider stares at Brady, waiting for his interiority play (or not play) on his face. If it weren’t an amateur performance, if it weren’t semi-autobiographical, it’d be a perfect example of a “brave performance.” But given the peculiar situation of Brady’s performance, it’s even more profound. Especially since protecting his interiority is one of Brady’s character traits, he refuses help, whether from doctors, dad Tim, or friend Clifford.

Sister Lilly’s the closest thing to comic relief, but always with sincerity and sweetness, though never saccharine. She’s got an amusing technology subplot; mobile devices collide with the existing Americana in the film, with Brady and Lane spending their visits watching themselves on YouTube. It doesn’t seem like the healthiest bonding pastime, but the film doesn’t invite second-guessing. Even without knowing the film’s based on Brady’s real life, watching The Rider feels like a privilege. We’re getting to see something private.

Zhao’s direction is patient and expansive; she and cinematographer Joshua James Richards love the South Dakota prairie and big sky country. The film’s usually breathtaking, even during the suspense sequences. As we learn more about Brady, there’s a growing, aching quality to the wide-open spaces. Even more than the rodeo, it seems like that gigantic part of Brady’s life—always out his window—is cut off.

Great music from Nathan Halpern too. The technicals are all superb.

The Rider is a remarkable film; a tragedy and a triumph; an examination of Americana, machismo, and courage, with Brady—a Christian Native American cowboy in the mid-2010s—a singular protagonist. His performance, like the film, is one-of-a-kind.

Eternals (2021, Chloé Zhao)

The nice thing about Eternals is the film’s most damaging element is obvious. Richard Madden is terrible. He’s not the lead—when Eternals has a lead, it’s Gemma Chan—but he’s top gun, so he gets a lot of screen time. And he’s terrible. What’s even funnier about Madden being terrible is the film leans into him being a “Game of Thrones” star. He’s got a love triangle with fellow “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington, who’s ostensibly in the movie but really just for a handful of cameos.

Harington is Chan’s adorable British boyfriend. Madden is her Scottish-accented alien super-being ex-husband. It’s a big flex when Harington and Madden face-off, and it’s clear not just Harington’s much better as a movie star than Madden, but Madden sucks the life out of scenes. He might be playing a Superman riff, but it’s an energy vampire Superman. He makes scenes worse. On the one hand, director Zhao can’t do anything with the performance, which has all the screen charisma of molded bread; on the other, she never compensates for it either.

Eternals rises and falls with Madden.

There are other big problems with the movie. It’s really boring for the first hour and a half. Eternals is solidly into the second act when it finally starts engaging. The film’s got a lot of expository information to dump, and every dump is a bad one. However, it manages to plod even more when it’s doing flashbacks.

The film opens with a “Star Wars but serious” title crawl explaining the Eternals are alien super-beings who live on Earth to protect the people from the “Deviants.” There are giant space entities out there who make galaxies and blah blah blah. Doesn’t matter. The movie figures out how to integrate these beyond enormous entities once in the entire film, and it’s a gimmick shot done well. So, the giant entities don’t matter. The human-shaped super-beings matter.

They show up on Earth in 5000 BCE. Madden immediately thinks Chan is cute; Chan immediately thinks Earth is charming. Salma Hayek is their leader, but she doesn’t really matter because she doesn’t have good fight scene powers. She’s a healer. Angelina Jolie’s the warrior one. Jolie gives the most amusing performance because she seems to get it more than anyone else. She’s stifling a smirk but still sincere when it counts.

Like when she’s hanging out with best bro Ma Dong-seok. He’s another warrior, the one with the big heart. Ma’s good. He doesn’t have good comic timing—in English, he’s always had it in Korean–but neither does Zhao, so it doesn’t matter.

The other Eternals are Kumail Nanjiani (laser fingers), Lia McHugh (illusion), Brian Tyree Henry (wills technology into existence), Lauren Ridloff (the speedster), and Barry Keoghan (the telepath). We meet them in the past, and then the film reintroduces them in the present when they’ve adjusted to regular human life. Albeit immortal regular human life.

Nanjiani gets the biggest story; he’s a Bollywood star with an amusing videographer sidekick, Harish Patel. McHugh is forever an awkward tween girl with an impossible crush. Yawn. Henry is a family man trying to put immortal meddling behind him. He’s gay, an MCU first, and it’s okay, but he’s most charming with the family, and they rush through having the family around. Ridloff and Keoghan just kind of come into the narrative as needed, even though they’ve got more charm than anyone else. It’s particularly impressive because Keoghan’s character is a twerp.

Bill Skarsgård plays the villain, an evolving man-beast. “Plays” meaning does the voice performance presumably some of the CGI modeling. The character eventually looks something like the monster from The Keep, which doesn’t seem intentional. Why recall one disaster in another.

There are some nearly neat 2001 references but then not really.

It’s unclear if fixing Eternals’s obvious problems would do any significant good. Besides Madden’s entire casting, there’s Chan’s lack of a protagonist arc, the momentum-killing flashbacks, Ramin Djawadi’s weak sauce epic movie score (just give up and hire Hans Zimmer for a Hans Zimmer score), and the awkward superhero references. Not just to the Marvel movies before it, but also to DC superheroes. Because world-building?

It also doesn’t help one of the credits snippets promise a far more amusing sequel, which has a cameo with great promise.

Zhao’s direction is fine. It’s often good. It’s never not fine. Ben Davis’s photography’s solid. There are a handful of composite shots where the foreground doesn’t match the CGI background, but it could be worse. Dylan Tichenor and Craig Wood’s editing’s good. Sammy Sheldon’s costumes. They’re all right.

Eternals could be worse. Madden could be in it a second longer. And it might never be good, but it also could’ve been better. Score alone. Get someone who could do Madden’s acting for him with the music. Whatever. And it could also be a second shorter overall. Any shorter would help.

Eternals is never really disappointing or even frustrating, just inconceivably tedious.

But, if they deliver on the mid-credits promise, the next one should be a blast.

Nomadland (2020, Chloé Zhao)

Nomadland becomes even more of an achievement when you find out the supporting cast is entirely amateur. The film’s a character study of lead Frances McDormand as she adjusts to her life as a modern nomad, traveling the country in her van (where she also lives), working seasonal jobs, and coming across a variety of people. All those people—with the exception of David Strathairn—are amateurs. Their effectiveness (or the outright quality of their performances) is stunning; because while McDormand is potentially an eccentric—the film takes a while giving that information—none of the folks she meets on the road come off as quirky Americana tropes. Director, screenwriter, and editor Zhao hones in on their humanity immediately.

The film takes place in 2011, after tragedy and the recession has ravaged McDormand’s life; after losing her home (she lived in a company town), she moves into her van while working a seasonal job at Amazon. She’s got a good friend at that job, Linda May (starring Linda May as Linda May, as it were). Zhao introduces the nomad lifestyle initially through May, before they both end up at a nomad retreat led by Bob Wells. That retreat might be the longest McDormand stays in one place, long enough to meet Strathairn, who’s immediately smitten with her, deepen her friendship with May, and meet a new good friend in Charlene Swankie.

Those four—May, Swankie, Strathairn, and Wells—will be the supporting cast, even though Nomadland never settles long enough for it to seem like a firm commitment. Zhao employs a lyrical structure to the film overall, with McDormand leading the film into excursions into the wilderness around her, but there’s some epical drama involving Strathairn, where the film—quite frankly—comes the closest to derailing. Zhao pulls it all together again and pushes up and over, saving the best for last as far as character revelation goes on McDormand. During her travels, we find out more and more of her backstory, with sister Melissa Smith doing one of the great character study monologues to explain their relationship, but Zhao and McDormand resist any actual reveals on the character until the very end. Then they knock it out of the park with a perfect finish.

I had been expecting Nomadland to be a depressing piece about the ravages of the Great Recession, but Zhao finds an entirely different story. Not one of resilience or survival but of contentment and wonderment. The way Zhao and McDormand do the nature scenes, when McDormand takes a walk off the beaten path, is divine. Zhao isn’t showing the world through McDormand’s eyes, rather McDormand’s eyes on the world and then McDormand carries through with showing her experience of those sights. It’s breathtaking.

And gets added heft thanks to some of the choice exposition throughout the film, all building—not epically but in energy—towards the conclusion. McDormand’s got an arc, the film hasn’t. If there’s a third act, it’s where Zhao figures out how to delineate between the two. Not because she’s been avoiding it, but because there’s an end to the film even though the entire picture’s about how there isn’t an end. It’s got to be done.

The film identifies some of the locales McDormand ends up, like Wall Drug (dollar ice creams are not a plot point, however), but not expressly. The Where isn’t important, rather the What, and how Zhao showcases that What. Nomadland showcases its scenery separately from how McDormand observes it, with Joshua James Richards’s gorgeous, lush photography—the stuff he and Zhao do with foreground and background is glorious—Ludovico Einaudi’s music, and then Zhao’s exceptional cutting. It’s in the first twenty minutes or so it becomes clear how good the editing is going to be throughout Nomadland; the photography’s the photography, it’s an obvious success, but the editing is simultaneously sublime and bombastic. Zhao does superior work, so even when it seems like they’re going to take an easy route to a traditional narrative in the second half, the editing’s still superb.

But then, of course, Zhao and McDormand figure out how to make that seeming short cut to didacticism into just another place where McDormand wanders off the path to look around on her own.

McDormand’s performance is singular. Nomadland is all her (or her van). The character reveals late in the film line up with the performance we’ve already seen; they don’t inform because it’d be too intentional and Nomadland takes wandering approach; McDormand doesn’t respond well to being constrained. It all comes together in that exceptional finish.

In the supporting cast, while Strathairn’s excellent, Swankie’s the best. She’s prickly as opposed to May, who’s all heart. Swankie’s prickle provides an excellent contrast to McDormand, who’s muted. Swankie challenges McDormand, while May reinforces her. And Strathairn (tries to) tempt her.

Nomadland’s a singular picture, exploring a very specific character in a very specific—albeit wandering—setting. Zhao and McDormand (and the cast and crew) make a very special and decidedly outstanding film.