Nomadland and Sound Of Metal are kinda the same film

 

Twins?

Nomadland and Sound Of Metal are basically the same movie. Kinda.

Hear me out.

Oh, and this contains spoilers for both films so leave now if you don't want either of these films spoiled.

Read my review of Nomadland here.

Read my review of Sound Of Metal here.

Still here? Good.

In a nutshell, both films are about the loss of identity, and the protagonist's quest to find themselves in a a community that exists on the fringe of society. 

Oh, and both protagonists drive and live in cool vans.

The two main characters here - Nomadland's Fern (Frances McDormand) and Sound Of Metal's Ruben (Riz Ahmed) - both suffer profound losses that leave them to try to figure out who the hell they are. 

In the case of Ruben, he loses his hearing. As a drummer, this costs him his passion and livelihood. Up until this point, everything in his life revolved around those things - he lived on the road, going from gig to gig with his bandmate who also happens to be his girlfriend. In Sound Of Metal, we never see Ruben having a life outside of music prior to his sudden deafness.  

In Fern's case, she loses her husband, her home and her job in a short amount of time. Losing all three of these elements in quick succession, as well as the financial situation she's left in, force her into an entirely new situation, effectively wiping out her past life and identity. She hits the road and rolls from job to job, and as Nomadland progresses, she questions where she fits into the world. She gets offers to stay in one spot and seems to contemplate these before ultimately rejecting them.

Fern and Ruben both find a new identity and sense of belonging in communities that survive outside "societal norms". Fern finds fellow grey nomads at the short-term jobs and trailer parks she frequents, eventually joining a whole community in the desert for a while. Ruben is directed to a commune for recovering drug addicts who happen to be deaf.

In these places, they rediscover themselves. Both find new friends and learn about their new lifestyles. 

This brings us to the major difference in these thematic similarities - whereas Fern accepts her new fate and comes to relish it for all its inconveniences and hardships, Ruben rejects it, desperate to reclaim the life he had before. This is demonstrated in the final scenes of both films. In Nomadland, Fern hits the road once more, having visited her former home one last time and offloaded the last of the belongings she had in storage. In Sound Of Metal, Ruben takes off the processors for his cochlear implants and sits in the silence. Up until that point, he has clung to his past life, but in those final moments, he seems to be both letting go of the past and wondering what the hell he's going to do next.

Both directors - Chloe Zhao and Darius Marder - also use their film-making techniques to amplify their themes. Zhao uses the landscapes and cinematography to highlight both Fern's isolation but also the beauty and extremes of her new life. Marder uses sound and editing to get inside Ruben's head and situation, and compare it to the rest of society.

I'm not sure if any of this means anything or matters, but it's interesting to me that two of the big films of 2020 shared such major thematic similarities. It's easy to say that in a shitshow of a year where many people lost so much and so much changed for people, themes of loss and identity would resonate, but the truth is both of these films were in the works long before people started eating pangolins or whatever the fuck happened.

The truth is probably that these are perennially interesting themes to explore because they hit home for a lot of people. And that's why these stories get told, and part of why Nomadland and Sound Of Metal are two of the best films of 2020.