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 (022821)
Fern (Frances McDormand), the solitary traveler whose wanderings make up
Nomadland, is killing time in the fluorescent-lit confines of a big-box store
when she runs into people she used to know — a mother and children with whom,
not so long ago, Fern had shared a community. Their small Nevada company town
had rapidly withered and died after the gypsum plant that sustained it was shut
down. While everyone else moved on, the widowed Fern just moved out, putting her
things into storage and living in her van, which she kitted out with a mattress
and a small stove. It’s cold outside, which is why she’s hanging out in the
sporting-goods section, and as she and her former neighbors stand there, one of
the daughters asks — with the ease of a teenager who has not yet been taught to
project shame onto others — if it’s true that Fern is homeless now. “I’m not
homeless, I’m just houseless,” Fern responds firmly. “Not the same thing,
right?”
Nomadland is a devastating film about the delicacies of that distinction, and it
could very well be the movie of the year in the early days of 2021. A fictional
adaptation of a nonfiction book by Jessica Bruder, it uses Fern as a lens
through which to view a subculture of travelers who live out of RVs and cars and
pick up gigs as they move around the country. Like Fern, many of them are near
retirement age but without the option or inclination to retire, and, instead of
struggling to sustain what they once had, they’ve whittled down their needs.
They’re refugees of the last recession, of rising housing costs, of a threadbare
safety net — though director Chloé Zhao, who also wrote the screenplay, refuses
to reduce them merely to byproducts of our increasingly callous capitalist
system. Through choice or necessity, they’ve traded career grinds and the lure
of the property ladder for a precarious but carefully guarded kind of liberation
— one supported by stints packaging products in sprawling Amazon warehouses or
loading beets onto trucks for the Western Sugar Cooperative. They are trying to
throw off what one of the movement’s spokespeople calls “the yoke of the tyranny
of the dollar.”
At an annual gathering of travelers out in the Arizona desert, attendees talk
around a fire at night about how their lifestyle can be a means of managing PTSD,
or of healing from the loss of loved ones. They actually spend time doing things
outdoors — instead of waiting around to have the time. These people are pilgrims
as much as exiles, and Nomadland is a movie of melancholy grandeur about the
American West told through their stories of hard-won independence. This comes as
no surprise; the Beijing-born Zhao has proven herself to be the best big-screen
chronicler of the region, both as an actual place as rugged territory and
stunning landscapes, and as a concept at the heart of our national mythology.
Her first two features, Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider, took place on
the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, with casts entirely made up of
locals who sometimes played variations on themselves. A lot of the performers in
this new film are also non-pros — and some of them real-life nomads — though
this time around she’s working with two established acting talents: McDormand,
who also served as a producer, and David Strathairn as Dave, a fellow vagabond
who takes a shine to Fern.
It’s not a seamless combination, though that’s not the fault of McDormand, who,
with her wary eyes and careworn expression, slots in easily alongside actual
travelers like the nature-loving Swankie and the savvy Linda May. Fern is just
more obviously a creation, her utility evident when she’s stringing together
episodic encounters with strangers or enabling someone to make a point that
didn’t need to be spoken aloud — like when her sister, Dolly (Melissa Smith),
stoutly proclaims Fern part of a tradition, “like the pioneers.” It takes a
while for Fern to firm up into a character rather than a narrative vehicle,
though when she does, she emerges as a fascinatingly contradictory figure in her
own right. She is someone who’s still in mourning and in whom the desires for
connection and freedom are constantly at war. She hasn’t been abandoned, either
by strangers or those who know her — throughout the film, people offer to take
her in. But that is never what she wants. In the nomads, who cross paths and
help each other but never try to hold on to one another too tightly, she seems
to have found her people.
They’re a people who owe something to the past, and the film makes a
heartrending reference to a famous shot late in its run-time that places Fern
explicitly at the end of a long line of characters who feel they can only exist
on the edges of civilization. But they’re just as much born of a
potentially-approaching collapse — utterly unsentimental in their
self-sufficiency, expecting nothing of anyone else. Their influence makes the
movie more moving. Through these characters, Zhao is able to examine the idea of
wide-open frontiers without nostalgia or the need to pathologize the parts of
our social structures that are eroding or have failed. Those shots of Fern, a
tiny, determined dot out there on a stunning panorama, are breathtaking and
elegiac. She is a woman eking out the life she wants to lead, a woman who has
gone to look for America.
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