karen miller

I was presented with this movie with no premise or introduction, and I found the fact that it wasn't filled with boring trite Disney tropes one of its most compelling features. It was an absolute Joy to watch fiction I couldn't predict and sleep through - ho hum, yeah, someone offered her a dog so that's going to be the hook, the Heartwarming Saving Grace for her life. The dog, the jobs, the lottery sign, the knocking man, the peeing man, the Knight in Shining Armor, the contrary sister, the dying friend, the return to familiar ground, Fern's appearance, even the nomadic community itself; after a while I found myself looking for deflated cliches like they were Easter eggs. How many commonplace Dramatic plot-wheel points were presented and then quietly left to die, just like real life will do. LOVED. THAT. (I will admit, I didn't see Fargo as a comedy the first time around, maybe some of this was supposed to be teasing from a screenwriter's perspective as well: peekaboo, I see you - and your pedestrian plot expectations - ha ha! If so, I laugh ... but I also smile, it was hugely refreshing.) If I have one disappointment, it's that the movie didn't end with an acknowledgment that it's possible to live like this and have internal happiness. I don't mean that stumbling into abject poverty, loss or unstable living situation is pleasant or desirable, ever, I mean that *emotionally speaking*, not everyone wants or needs the assumed brass rings of intimate personal relationships or an entirely predictable life, some people find their peace in a different place. To me, once Fern healed from her grief and losses she seemed to be made for life alone on the road, it was acknowledged that she was always 'weird', 'adventurous' and generally somewhat unlike other people. Would have been a wonderful character arc. Frances McDormand did a fantastic job of portraying a person with odd but kind personal skills and yet extreme boundaries, and a lot of wisdom, resilience, pain and sorrow, but Fern's eventual good fit for the life she chose seemed lost in projected expectations (by the writers/directors) of what she "ought to" want. It's the one truism they didn't disassemble. Unfortunately, by the end Fern still seemed pretty much the same sad, exhausted and emotionally grim person we first met, as if the best anyone could hope for from nomadic life is buried anxiety and tolerated suffering. Moving her from stunted and stoic grief to inner peace that had the eventual potential to blossom into inner joy would have been satisfying. A hint of a smile and an ending score that evolved slightly from sounding like it was mourning humanity's existence itself would have been enough, just a brief and relatively ambiguous suggestion of possibility. I don't seek a "happy Disney ending" and this one was wryly satisfying as the ultimate deflated cliche, but when it's portrayed at all, the nomadic existence is usually presented as being a frightening, filthy, hopeless, lonely, incompetent and terrible life, panhandling its way to bare survival, maintained due to addiction, mental illness, pathological misanthropy, or perhaps unrequited stupidity. The nomad community refuted this joyously, Bob Wells was marvelous, and of course all of those things do have the potential to be true, but since we were following Fern, it would have been satisfying to have the flip side portrayed by her personally: that even if it's not an intentional goal, a single nomadic living situation can be a positive and even transcendent alternative for the right individual.