Nomadland: a review

Nomadland
Director, Chloé Zhao

For viewers of a certain age, this film will scare the bejezus out of you. Nomadland highlights the tenuous thread keeping older Americans from completely unraveling. Starting with the Great Recession of 2009 up to today when many of those same people decided to storm the American capital, there is a segment of society that feels forgotten and marginalized. Unheard. Desperate.

The character of focus in the film, Fern, is laid off from her job in a gypsum sheetrock factory in Empire, Nevada, a place she remembers as being on the fringe of the desert, where her house looked out onto . . . nothing. Desert. She loved it. And, she loved her husband. She is grieving so much. A facet of most everyone on her same journey, a slew of losses that they are trying to reconcile or run from.

Fern decides, or else fate has decided for her, to convert an econo-van into a tiny house and sets out to make a living as an itinerate worker. She works the seasonal shift at Amazon, the beet harvest in the Dakotas, cleans bathrooms at a State Park and later at a National Park. With her friend Linda May they travel down south for the warmth but also the comradery of a van-life meet-up in the desert, a sort of Burning Man for seniors on a fixed income. There are messages from vanlife guru Bob Wells who plays himself in the movie.

In fact everyone plays their self. Adapting non-fiction for the screen can be a tricky thing. One needs 3 acts and Chloé Zhao has managed to create an arc from “found” images, from cinema veritas, from nomad land. There are several scenes that feel like someone left the camera on and walked away and captured the “real-life” story behind the people and the movement. I’m still processing on defining what exactly this movement is—

It is what is scaring me the most.

The idea that we might not have done enough, that there is no way to escape the possibility that I might be abandoned to my youthful decisions to live an extemporaneous life of self-sacrifice and benevolence for others. In other words: I haven’t put much away for the rainy day.

To be fair some in the film have thought ahead, but we find that “playing by the rules” has left them still in a hole financially. They’ve done everything right. They worked hard all their life and haven’t got a lot to show for it. People in their 60s and 70s who are not homeless, but without houses, sentenced to finding creative ways to live independently. This is where we learn about vanlife, about Nomadland. A group of transient senior citizens on the road, looking for work and community.

Frances McDormand, occupies this role, is absorbed into it so much that we firmly believe something has happened—she lost her Oscar and her marriage and Hollywood lifestyle and has fallen onto hard times, adopting the new name of Fern, and a rough haircut. She is not a hero. She and the other vanners acknowledge they live outside society because of some hard/dumb choices. They are estranged from family. They can be cranky, hard to live with, set in their way. Fighting addiction, loneliness, the demons that have chased them their entire life.

But we also are let in on some glorious moments that feel found, discovered along the way. Revelations that life is to be lived, while still alive. These nomads have reached out and grasped it as best they can—like stardust recycled from a great and mysterious universe.